And at last she rode away from this place, surrounded by a brave little troop of nobles, their armour glancing in the sun as they caracoled off along these grassy forest glades. Then amid the restored quiet, only the whisper of the woods about them and the murmur of the river far below, the women waited here, listening. Presently, sudden and ominous, they heard a sound in the distance--cannonading near Glasgow, ten miles away. The Queen had been intercepted on her journey to Dunbarton. There was not much of the sound, and it died feebly. Hours afterwards, anxious waiting hours, down these forest avenues, slowly, with drooping crest and broken spear, came riding the lord of the castle, haggard, and almost alone. For of the gallant gentlemen who had followed him to Langside many had fallen upon the field, and the rest were scattered and fleeing for their lives. What sorrowings then for those who would never return must there have been within these walls--what aching hearts for those who had escaped! The smoke of the houses in Clydesdale, fired by the victorious army of the Regent, could almost be seen from here; and day after day news came of friends taken and friends in flight, until it was whispered that the Queen herself was a prisoner in the hands of the English Warden. A weary and anxious time it must have been; but the danger passed, and the hour of reprisal came. Through these woods, according to the tradition preserved by Sir Walter Scott, on a January afternoon less than two years after the battle of Langside, a hunting-party was returning to the castle. Amid the fast-falling shadows of the winter day they were bringing home their quarry--the wild bull whose race still roams these glades; and the guests and huntsmen were making merry over the success of their sport. There was the jingle, too, of hawk-bells, and the bark of hounds in leash. But their lord rode in front, silent, with clenched hand and clouded brow. He had not forgotten the misfortune that had befallen his house, and news of a fresh insult had but lately quickened his anger over it. The estate of one of his kinsmen, Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, had been confiscated to a favourite of the Regent, and the new possessor, it was said, had used his power with such severity, in turning out Bothwellhaugh’s wife and new-born infant on a freezing night, that the poor lady had become furiously mad. Brooding darkly and bitterly on these evils, the chief was drawing near the castle, when there was suddenly heard approaching the heavy gallop of a horse, and in another moment Bothwellhaugh sprang to the earth before him. His face was wild and pale, and his steed, bespattered with foam and blood, drooped its head in exhaustion. Vengeance swift and dire had fallen upon the Regent, and, twenty miles away, in Linlithgow Palace, the birthplace of the sister he had dethroned, he lay dying. It is for a higher Judge than man to say whether his death was that of a martyr or