The Leith people and the Edinburgh people were quite unprepared, the last intimation from France having pointed to the end of the month as the probable time of the Queen’s arrival, if she were to be expected at all. But the cannon-shots from the galleys, as they contrived to near Leith harbour, were, doubtless, a sufficient advertisement. Soon, so far as the fog would permit, all Leith was in proper bustle, and all the political and civic dignitaries that chanced to be in Edinburgh were streaming to Leith. Not till the evening, according to one account, not till next morning, according to another, did the Queen leave her galley and set foot on shore. Then, to allow a few hours more for getting her Palace of Holyrood, and her escort thither, into tolerable readiness, she took some rest in the house in Leith deemed most suitable for her reception, the owner being Andrew Lamb, a wealthy Leith merchant. It was in the afternoon of Wednesday, the 20th of August, that there was the procession on horseback of the Queen, her French retinue, and the gathered Scottish lords and councillors, through the two miles of road which led from Leith to Holyrood. On the way the Queen was met by a deputation of the Edinburgh craftsmen and their apprentices, craving her royal pardon for the ringleaders in a recent riot, in which the Tolbooth had been broken open and the Magistrates insulted and defied. This act of grace accorded as a matter of course, the Queen was that evening in her hall of Holyrood, the most popular of sovereigns for the moment, her uncles and other chiefs of her escort with her, and the rest dispersed throughout the apartments, while outside, in spite of the fog, there were bonfires of joy in the streets and up the slopes of Arthur Seat, and a crowd of cheering loiterers moved about in the space between the palace-gate and the foot of the Canongate. Imparting some regulation to the proceedings of this crowd, for a while at least, was a special company of the most “honest” of the townsmen, “with instruments of musick and with musicians,” admitted within the gate, and tendering the Queen their salutations, instrumental and vocal, under her chamber-window. “The melody, as she alledged, lyked her weill, and she willed the same to be continewed some nightis after.” This is Knox’s account; but Brantôme tells a different story. After noting the wretchedness of the hackneys provided for the procession from Leith to Holyrood, and the poorness of their harnessings and trappings, the sight of which, he says, made the Queen weep, he goes on to mention the evening serenade under the windows of Holyrood as the very completion of the day’s disagreeables. The Abbey itself, he admits, was a fine enough building; but, just as the Queen had supped and wanted to go to sleep, “there came under her window five or six hundred rascals of the town to serenade her with vile fiddles and rebecks, such as they do not lack in