prisoners, royal brides-elect, young widowed queens, and the coveted persons of infant princes. Scottish sovereigns, especially in the Stuart days, seldom died peaceful deaths; and so there were generally left a youthful queen-widow and a little crowned boy chafing under a long minority in the Castle. Weary days must all these semi-prisoners have spent there, looking out over wooded and hilly country to the Forth. One such fretted treasure kept in the Castle was Margaret, the daughter of Henry III. of England, when she was betrothed to Alexander III. The King was only ten years old when he married her at York; so the little Queen could not have been very aged, and she complained in letters to her father of the sad and solitary place she was kept in, and that it was “without verdure,” and, “by reason of its vicinity to the sea, unwholesome.” In the days of Wallace, and of Bruce and Balliol, Edinburgh Castle was the scene of many a fight and many a siege. Edward I. of England, whose name must ever be a black one in Scotland, garrisoned the Castle with English soldiers and took away all the documents of national interest to the Tower of London; and he also stole Queen Margaret’s Black Rood of Scotland; and it was in Queen Margaret’s own little oratory that he received the enforced oaths of fealty from a small band of five Scottish clergy, among them the Abbot of Holyrood, and a Prioress. Sir William Wallace recaptured the Castle, and the English took it again; and then comes a romantic incident of the days of Bruce. The Bruce had entrusted the retaking of Edinburgh Castle to Sir Thomas Randolph of Strathdon. Among Randolph’s soldiers was one named Frank, who, long before this, when he had been stationed at the Castle, had found out a way of getting up and down the Castle Rock in order to visit a sweetheart who lived in the town below. Frank undertook to lead a small body of men up the perilous path he had so often traversed alone. Randolph consented; and, one dark and stormy night in March 1314,--March has ever been a fateful month in Scottish history,--when the howling wind and lashing rain would help to cover the sounds of stealthy climbing, thirty men crept after Frank up the precipitous cliffs, the walls were silently scaled, the English garrison was overpowered, and Edinburgh Castle was once more in the hands of Scots. Randolph, to prevent further fighting, dismantled the whole place; and for twenty-four years the proud old fortress stood silent and deserted,--neither clash of arms nor call of bugle, neither shout of command nor shriek of dying,--only the rain and the sunshine, day after day, high above the city. But this was not to last; and, after all the English garrisons had been driven out, Edinburgh became the favourite residence of David II., the Castle was refortified, and “David’s Tower” built, in which King David II., the last of the Bruce line, died. Since then, no king has died in Edinburgh,--though in