Two boys were quarrelling in the privy garden of Stirling Castle on the Forth. Their shrill little passions rose ludicrously inconsonant with the majestic gravity of the old historic pile. That had its roots deep-striking into the mighty rock from which it had sprung; and, above, every lusty tower, every folded roof, every soaring pinnacle of the massed congeries of hall and chapel and battlement which comprised the royal rookery was a living testimony to the fecundity of the source from which those roots had drunk. Stirling Castle, in common with other impregnable fortresses of its kind, had grown fat and strong, like a strapping vine, on the blood which soaked its bases--so strong that, in this year of stormy grace 1576, it was still the residence confidently appropriated to a regal minor. The Castle, massive and somnolent, commanded imperturbably from its height the beautiful open champaign--with its meandering river like a silver uncoiled spring--in the midst of which it was set; the angry small voices vexed its serenity about as much as a buzzing fly might vex a mammoth. Yet they had this right in common with the great voices of the past; one of them came from the lungs of a nestling of the right eagle breed. He, this nestling--the one destined to be our first Stuart monarch--was a stubby, commonplace boy of ten. His face was pale and somewhat meaty, his features were undistinguished in a pawky good-humoured way, his hair was longish and of a bright auburn, which was to deepen later on. Now, under the influence of anger, its roots were flushed red, which gave it an inflamed look, and the young gentleman’s close-buttoned doublet was sadly disordered, and its lace torn at the wrists. And what _was_ the subject of dispute, meet to environments so stern and so imposing? Why just a tame sparrow, which King Jamie was bent on appropriating from his young playmate, the Master of Mar, to whom it had been presented by a diplomatic gardener. “Gie it me, Geordie,” cried his Majesty, snatching and struggling. “I wull hae it. Saul of my body, man, dinna ye ken the voice of royalty?” The other, a ferrety, pink-lidded and ginger-headed boy, lithe but no match in avoirdupois for his thicker-set antagonist, answered only by cries and contortions. In the result, the sparrow changed hands, a crushed and lifeless little body. Geordie broke away, and made, howling, for a certain room in the Castle. It was a room well known to him, sombre, rude in its scholastic appointments, but with the stony acerbities of its walls somewhat softened by a good lining of books. An old man of seventy, sitting reading by the bare strong table, raised his head as the intruder entered. “Ye’ll be comin’ to tell me of some new act of tyranny, Geordie man?” he said.