James reigned in Scotland for thirteen years--a reign full of commotion and movement, by which many in high place were humiliated, the spoils of the feudal tyrants taken from them, and the wrongs of the suffering commonalty redressed, proceedings which procured for the King many enemies among the nobility before the force of popular sentiment was strong enough to balance this opposition by its support. He began in Scotland that struggle which for some time had been going on in England against the power of the nobles, who were still in the north something like a number of petty kings ruling in their own right, making little account of national laws, and regarding the King with defiance as almost a hostile power. One of the greatest risks of such a struggle is that it raises now and then a fiery spirit stung by the sense of injury and the rage of deprivation into a wild passion of revenge which bursts every restraint. The Grahams of Strathearn in the north had fallen specially under the rectifying process of James's new laws of property: and out of this house there suddenly arose the tragic figure of an avenger whose brief but terrible career occupies but a single page in history, yet contains all the elements of a fatal drama. Sir Robert Graham, of whose antecedents there is little record, was not the head of the house, but a younger brother of daring character, and one of those fanatics of race to whom the glory of their house is a religion. The first we hear of him is a sudden appearance in the Parliament of January 1435, when he made a fiery and violent speech, ending by an impeachment of the King himself for injustice and robbery. Such an assault would find little support in the public assembly of the States, in the awe of the royal presence, and Graham had to escape for his life, finding means of flight into the Highlands, the ever-ready refuge for rebels. There he launched wild threats against James, which the King, probably well accustomed to missiles of the kind, paid little attention to. The monarch was warned too, we are told, by another wild apparition, which suddenly appears out of the mists for this purpose--a Highland witch of the order of those who drove Macbeth's ambition to frenzy, but whose mission now was to warn James of the mischief brewing against him. The King was brave and careless, used to the continual presence of danger, keeping his Christmas merrily at Perth with all the sports and entertainments with which it was possible to cheat the gloomy weather, and made little but additional mirth both of the prophecy and the threats. Evidently the Court found pleasure in the fair city on the Tay. They were still lingering there, having taken up their residence in the monastery of the Black Friars, at the end of February. In Scotland as elsewhere the great religious houses seem to have been the best adapted to give hospitality to kings. It was long after this date before anything that could be