When the weather moderated and the ice was unsafe for skating, they substituted riding and driving excursions, and visited all the remarkable places in the neighborhood. They visited Roslyn Castle and went down into those fearful vaults, three tiers under ground, and listened to the guide who told them traditions of the princely state kept up by the ancient lords of Roslyn, who had noblemen of high degree for their carvers and cupbearers; and of those ladies of Roslyn, who never moved from home without a train of two hundred waiting gentlewomen and two hundred mounted knights. They visited Roslyn Chapel and admired the unequaled beauty of its architecture, and gazed at the wondrous chef d'oeuvre--the "apprentice's pillar"--and heard the story how a poor but gifted boy, hoping to please, had designed and executed the work during the absence of his master, who, on returning and seeing the beautiful pillar, fell into a frenzy of envious rage and slew his apprentice. They visited the ruins of Craigmillar Castle and stood in the little stone den, seven feet by four, which is known as "Queen Mary's bedroom." They saw those deep, dark dungeons where in the olden times captives pined away their lives forgotten of all above ground; they saw the "execution room," with its condemned cell, its chains and staples, its instruments of torture, its altar and its block. It was indeed a --"Dire dungeon, place of doom, Of execution, too, and tomb!" where, in those savage times, great criminals and innocent victims were alike condemned unheard, and secretly shrived, beheaded, and buried. They passed on to a still more terrible dungeon among those dread vaults--a circular stone crypt surrounded by tall, deep, narrow niches, in which human beings had been built up alive. With a shudder Claudia turned from all these horrors to the countess: "It is said that our country has no past, no history, no monuments. I am glad of it. Better her past should be a blank page than be written over with such bloody hieroglyphics as these. When I consider these records and reflect upon the deeds of this crime- stained old land, I look upon our own young nation as an innocent child. Let us leave this place. It kills me, Berenice." On Sunday morning at the breakfast table Lady Hurstmonceux proposed, as the day was fine, that they should drive into Edinboro' and attend divine services at St. Giles' Cathedral, interesting from being the most ancient place of worship in the city; a richly endowed abbey and ecclesiastical school in the Middle Ages; and at a later period, after the Reformation, the church, from which. John Knox delivered his fierce denunciation of the sins and sinners of his day. All this Berenice told Claudia at the breakfast table, seeking to draw her thoughts away from the subject of her own position. But at the invitation from Lady Hurstmonceux to attend a Christian place of worship Claudia looked up in surprise and exclaimed impulsively: