A party of the king's guard, with a knight in full armour, and a female prisoner riding behind him, drew the burgesses from all quarters to the centre of the street. "Jean Seton of Ashkirk," flew from mouth to mouth, mingled with mutterings of commiseration and hatred, as the sympathies or antipathies of the rabble led them. Many there were who mourned that one so young and fair should be made another sacrifice to the animosity avowedly borne by the king and the court against that humbled faction which had triumphed over both so long, and many there were who remembered the deadly strife of 1520:-- "When startled burghers fled afar, The furies of the border war; When the streets of high Dunedin, Saw axes gleam, and falchions redden;" when, sheathed in full mail, her father, at the head of a hundred barbed horsemen, had thrice hewn a passage through the barricaded streets, giving to death and defeat the spearmen of Arran. Many women, whose husbands and fathers, lovers and brothers, had fallen on that terrible 29th of April, recalled their treasured hatred as keenly as if the strife of seventeen years had been enacted but seventeen hours ago, and openly, bitterly, and unpityingly reviled her. "A Hamilton! a Hamilton!" "Doon wi' the Setons! doon wi' the Douglases! doon wi' the star and the bluidy heart!" "Set her up, wi' her lace and her pearlings sae braw, when an honest wife like me wears but a curstsey o' flannel!" "Holy Virgin!" cried another crone in a grey cloak and a flanders-mutch; "and to think I hae taen an awmous frae this Seton sorceress! 'Twas weel I had my relique o' blessed St. Roque aboot me!" "Fie upon thee, thou fause Seton! Death to the witch! bones to the fire, and soul to Satan!" Full of horror at these frightful and opprobrious cries, this poor being, whose gentleness had never created her a personal enemy, surrounded by her guard and a vast mob that every moment grew more dense as the street narrowed, arrived at the Castle-port, an ancient and massive archway in the Spur, which then lay between the castle and the town, covering the whole of what is now called the Esplanade, and surmounted by a round bastion, displaying a flag and more than twenty pieces of brass cannon. There the governor of the fortress--the strong towers of which were looming redly and grimly in the morning sunshine above the parapets and glacis of this hornwork--received Lady Jane, as the king's prisoner, from the herald and captain of the guard, who drew his soldiers across the Castle-hill-street, to bear back the tumultuous crowd, whose clamour reverberated with a thousand echoes in that high and narrow thoroughfare.