Whether correct or not, this scheme, allowing for lapse of memory as to dates, is feasible. Who can, remote from any documents, remember the dates of occurrences all through a month now distant by eight years? There were no daily newspapers, no ready means of ascertaining a date. Queen Mary’s accusers, in their chronological account of her movements about the time of Darnley’s death, are often out in their dates. In legal documents of the period the date of the day of the month of an event is often left blank. This occurs in the confirmation of Logan’s own will. ‘He died --- July, 1606.’ When lawyers with plenty of leisure for inquiry were thus at a loss for dates of days of the month (having since the Reformation no Saints’ days to go by), Sprot, in prison, might easily go wrong in his chronology. [Picture: Fastcastle] In any case, taking Letter IV provisionally as genuine in substance, we note that, on July 29, Logan did not yet know the date fixed for Gowrie’s enterprise. He suggested ‘the beginning of harvest,’ and, by August 5, harvest had begun. One of the Perth witnesses was reaping in the ‘Morton haugh,’ when he heard the town bell call the citizens to arms. But Gowrie must have acted in great haste, Logan not knowing, till, say, August 2 or 3, the date of a plot that exploded on August 5. Gowrie may have thought, as Lord Maxwell said when arranging his escape from Edinburgh Castle, ‘Sic interprysis are nocht effectuat with deliberationis and advisments, bot with suddane resolutionis.’ It is very important, we must freely admit, as an argument against the theory of carrying James to Logan’s impregnable keep of Fastcastle, that only one question, in our papers, is asked as to the provisioning of Fastcastle, and _that_ merely as to the supply of drink! Possibly this had been ascertained in Sprot’s earlier and unrecorded examinations (April 19-July 5). One poor hogshead of wine (a trifle to Logan) had been sent in that summer; so Matthew Logan deponed. As Logan had often used Fastcastle before, for treasonable purposes, he was not (it may be supposed) likely to leave it without provisions. Moreover these could be brought by sea, from Dirleton, where Carey (August 11) says that Gowrie had stored ‘all his provision.’ Moreover Government did not wish to prove intent to _kidnap_ the King. That was commonly regarded as a harmless constitutional practice, not justifying the slaughter of the Ruthvens. From the first, Government insisted that _murder_ was intended. In the Latin indictment of the dead Logan this is again dwelt on; Fastcastle is only to be the safe haven of the murderers. This is a misreading of Letter IV, where Fastcastle is merely spoken of as to be used for a meeting, and ‘the concluding of our plot.’