savages,--men dressed in the skins of deer, with “hauberks of jingling rings.” These were the Highlanders from the Hebrides, whither Donald Bane, Malcolm’s younger brother, had fled when Malcolm had gone to England. The Hebrides and the Saxon Court had educated the two brothers somewhat differently; and now, after long years, Donald Bane had come hopefully and cheerfully forth to kill his nephews and make himself King. But not in vain had Queen Margaret lived the life of a saint. Up from the Firth of Forth on that November day in 1093 there came a crawling white mist, creeping over the woods and morasses, covering the hills, leaving white density in its trail, till it blotted the whole Castle out of sight of the enemy below. And who are these figures that come stealing out of the western postern into the white woolly mist? And what is the burden they bear so reverently? These are the royal orphan children and the faithful Confessor, Bishop Turgot; and the burden is the dead queen in her coffin. Safely down the precipitous rock, step by step, they carry it,--awe-stricken by the miraculous mist sent by Heaven to help them. Heaven sends many such mists from the Forth into Edinburgh. It sent another to greet Mary, Queen of Scots, when she first landed from France; but then it was not by a Catholic Confessor called a miracle, but by a Presbyterian Reformer an omen. Nowadays they are called “easterly haars.” And so Queen Margaret made her last journey from Edinburgh Castle across the Forth by ferry to Dunfermline, to the Abbey she had built, where, a century and a half later, silver lamps were kindled on her tomb, for she had been canonised by Pope Innocent IV. Of the group of children who helped to carry their mother’s coffin down through the mist that day, four of the five sons were Kings of Scotland in their turn, and one of the two daughters became a Queen of England. The Castle was always a safe royal residence; and, though the Scottish Kings had palaces and castles elsewhere, they all lived from time to time in this Castle of Edinburgh. Also, because of its impregnable strength, it was used as a place of safety in which to stow away such things as monks and nuns, political [Illustration: EDINBURGH CASTLE FROM THE ESPLANADE Immediately beneath the Half-Moon Battery is the entrance to the Castle. To the extreme right of the picture on the north side of the Esplanade shows a bronze statue of the Duke of York, whilst the Celtic cross in its foreground was erected to the memory of the 78th Highlanders, behind which is the Forewall Battery. Men of the Black Watch in khaki occupy the south side of the Esplanade, with a drummer in the foreground.]