The Lady went to cheer the other knights and squires; then ordered the dinner to be got ready, and the room to be dressed. When she had devised all, and commanded her people what seemed good to her, she returned with a gladsome face before the King,"--in whose presence we must leave her yet awhile, having other matters to attend to. So much for Wat of Harden's life then, and his wife's. We shall get a little faster on with the genealogy after this fair start. II. Sir William Scott of Harden. Wat's eldest son; distinguished by the early favour of James VI. In his youth, engaging in a foray on the lands of Sir Gideon Murray of Elibank, and being taken prisoner, Murray offers him choice between being hanged, or marrying the plainest of his daughters. The contract of marriage, written on the parchment of a drum, is still in possession of the family of Harden. [52] This is Lockhart's reading of the circumstances, and I give his own statement of them in the note below. But his assumption of the extreme plainness of the young lady, and of the absolute worldly-mindedness of the mother, are both examples of the modern manner of reading traditions, out of which some amusement may be gathered by looking only at them on the grotesque side, and interpreting that grotesqueness ungenerously. There may, indeed, be farther ground than Lockhart has thought it worth while to state for his colour of the facts; but all that can be justly gathered from those he has told is that, Sir Gideon having determined the death of his troublesome neighbour, Lady Murray interfered to save his life; and could not more forcibly touch her husband's purpose than by reminding him that hostility might be better ended in alliance than in death. The sincere and careful affection which Sir William of Harden afterwards shows to all his children by the Maid of Elibank, and his naming one of them after her father, induce me still farther to trust in the fairer reading of the tradition. I should, indeed, have been disposed to attach some weight, on the side of the vulgar story, to the curiously religious tendencies in Sir William's children, which seem to point to some condition of feeling in the mother, arising out of despised life. Women are made nobly religious by the possession of extreme beauty, and morbidly so by distressed consciousness of the want of it; but there is no reason for insisting on this probability, since both the Christian and surname of Sir Gideon Murray point to his connection with the party in Scotland which was at this time made strong in battle by religious faith, and melancholy in peace by religious passion. III. Walter Scott, first Laird of Raeburn; third son of Sir William and this enforced bride of Elibank. They had four sons altogether; the eldest, William, becomes the second Sir William of Harden; their father settled the lands of Raeburn upon Walter; and of Highchester on his second son, Gideon, named, after the rough father-in-law, of Elibank.