The starlings are feeding this afternoon on the Court Knowe, the hillock there, undisturbed; and it is three hundred and twenty-eight years since the stricken queen rode away through the hollow of the hills where the green corn is growing. The suburbs of the city are spreading even over the battlefield itself. But ever and again, upon a summer day, there comes a pilgrim to stand a while in pitying silence on the little knoll under the trees, and to recall something of these “old, unhappy, far-off things,” as he reads upon the stone there the royal monogram, and the date, May 13, 1568. SCHOOL-DAYS. As a means of awakening the genial after-dinner humour of most men past middle age, no subject, perhaps, equals the memory of early school-days. Let the topic but be started by an anecdote of some long dead dominie, it is as if the spigot had been drawn from a butt of old vintage, and the stream of recollection will flow forth rich and sparkling with the mellowed light of years. Strange is the charm of a word! For a lifetime a man has been painfully toiling up the Alps of circumstance; it may be he has gained the object of his desire--the glittering ice-crystal on the peak which long ago dazzled his upward-looking eyes; and now, toying with the walnuts and the wine, someone says “I remember:”--lo! the years are forgotten; the greybeard is back in the sunny valley of his boyhood, wandering the field-paths with chubby companions long since dust, and filling his heart once more with the sweet scent of hayricks, of the hedges in hawthorn-time. It is not for nothing that rustic children day after day, as they start for school, hear the low of the farmyard kine coming in to the milking, and that day after day, as they tread the long miles of moorland path, they see the grouse whirr off to the mountain, and the trout dart away from the sunny shallows; and it is not for nothing that they spend long truant afternoons by ferny lanes and harebell copses in the seasons of bird-nesting and bramble-gathering. These make the fragrant memories of after years! And again and again, in later life, to the man jaded with anxiety and care, the old associations come back, laden with pleasant regrets--a breath from the clover-fields of youth.