The voyage was both tedious and trying, the sea was rough, and the royal voyagers were ill. On the morning of the 31st they were only coasting Northumberland, when the Queen saw the Fern Islands, where Grace Darling's lighthouse and her heroic story were still things of yesterday. Before her Majesty's return to England, she heard what she had not known at the time, that the brave girl had died within twenty-four hours of the royal yacht's passing the lighthouse station. The Queens first remark on the Scotch coast, though it happened to be the comparatively tame east coast, was "very beautiful--so dark, rocky, bold, and wild--totally unlike our coast." All her observations had the naive freshness and sympathetic willingness to be pleased, of an unexhausted, unvitiated mind. She noticed everything, and was gratified by details which would have signified nothing to a sated, jaded nature, or, if they had made an impression, would only have called forth more weariness, varied by contemptuous criticism. The longer light in the north, that dear summer gloaming which is neither night nor day, but borrows something from both--from the silence and solemn mystery of the latter, and from the clear serenity of the former--a leisure time which is associated from youth to age with a host of happy, tender associations; the pipes playing in one of the fishing-boats; the reel danced on board an attendant steamer; the bonfires on the coast--nothing was too trivial to escape the interested watcher, or was lost upon her, Queen though she was. The anchor of the royal yacht was let down in Leith Roads at midnight. At seven o'clock on the morning of the 1st of September the Queen saw before her the good town of Leith, where Queen Mary had landed from France; and in the background, Edinburgh half veiled in an autumn fog, lying at the foot of its semicircle of hills--the grim couchant lion of Arthur's seat; Salisbury Crags, grey and beetling; the heatherly slopes of the Pentlands in the distance. A little after eight her Majesty landed at Granton Pier, amidst the cheers of her Scotch subjects. The Duke of Buccleugh, whose public-spirited work the pier was, stood there to receive his sovereign, when she put her foot on shore, as he had already been on board the yacht to greet her arrival in what was once called Scotland Water.