[Illustration: _Grayfriars Church._] [Illustration: _High Street--Allan Ramsay's Shop._] The pilgrim could muse for many an hour over the little Venetian mirror[50] that hangs in the bedroom of Mary Stuart, in Holyrood Palace. What faces and what scenes it must have reflected! How often her own beautiful countenance and person,--the dazzling eyes, the snowy brow, the red gold hair, the alabaster bosom,--may have blazed in its crystal depths, now tarnished and dim, like the record of her own calamitous and wretched days! Did those lovely eyes look into this mirror, and was their glance scared and tremulous, or fixed and terrible, on that dismal February night, so many years ago, when the fatal explosion in the Kirk o' Field resounded with an echo that has never died away? Who can tell? This glass saw the gaunt and livid face of Ruthven, when he led his comrades of murder into that royal chamber, and it beheld Rizzio, screaming in mortal terror, as he was torn from the skirts of his mistress and savagely slain before her eyes. Perhaps, also, when that hideous episode was over and done with, it saw Queen Mary and her despicable husband the next time they met, and were alone together, in that ghastly room. "It shall be dear blood to some of you," the queen had said, while the murder of Rizzio was doing. Surely, having so injured a woman, any man with eyes to see might have divined his fate, in the perfect calm of her heavenly face and the smooth tones of her gentle voice, at such a moment as that. "At the fireside tragedies are acted,"--and tragic enough must have been the scene of that meeting, apart from human gaze, in the chamber of crime and death. No other relic of Mary Stuart stirs the imagination as that mirror does,--unless, perhaps, it be the little ebony crucifix, once owned and reverenced by Sir Walter Scott and now piously treasured at Abbotsford, which she held in her hands when she went to her death, in the hall of Fotheringay Castle. [Illustration: _The Canongate._]