A few hundred yards from the Abbey, down a back street, there stands a picturesque old house, robbed now of some of its picturesqueness by the substitution of tiles for the old thatched roof that once was there. It is the house where, in a room in the second story whose window overlooks a pleasant garden and the once crystal Jed, Mary, Queen of Scots lay many days, sick unto death,--a house surely that should now be owned and cared for by the Burgh. Local tradition (for what it may be worth) has it that the Queen lodged first in the house which is now the Spread Eagle Hotel, but that a fire breaking out there, she was hastily removed to that which now goes by the name of "Queen Mary's House." It stands in what must in her day have been a beautiful garden, sloping to the river. Hoary, moss-grown apple trees still blossom there and bear fruit. "With its screen of dull trees in front," says Dr. Robert Chambers, "the house has a somewhat lugubrious appearance, as if conscious of connection with the most melancholy tale that ever occupied the page of history." In those long past days, however, its appearance must have been far from lugubrious; and indeed even now, on a pleasant sunny evening of late spring when thick-clustered {105}apple and pear blossom drape the boughs, and thrushes sing, and Jed ripples musically beneath the worn arches of that fine [Illustration: 0125] {106}old bridge near at hand, (across which they say that the stones for building the Abbey were brought these many centuries agone), it is more of peace than of melancholy that the place speaks. Yet there is sadness too, when one thinks of the--at least on _this_ occasion--sorely maligned woman who lay there in grievous suffering in the darkening days of that October of 1566. "Would that I had died at Jedworth," she sighed in later years. She had been spared much, the Fates had been less unkind, if death had then been her part. And not least, she might have been spared the malignant slanders of the historian Buchanan, who, at any rate in this matter, showed himself a master of the art of suppressing the true and suggesting the false. When, according to Buchanan, news was brought to Mary at Borthwick Castle of the wounding of Bothwell by "a poor thief, that was himself ready to die,"--how, one wonders, would the famous "Little Jock Elliot" have relished that description of himself?--"she flingeth away in haste like a mad woman, by great journeys in post, in the sharp time of winter." As a matter of fact, when the news of Bothwell's mishap reached the Queen, she was already on her way to Jedburgh, to hold there a Circuit Court; and the time, of course, was not winter, but early October, not unusually one of the pleasantest times of the whole year in the south of Scotland.