[#] Mr Surtees observes, on this passage, that in the return made by the commissioners, on the dissolution of Newminster Abbey, there is an item of a Chauntery, for one priest to sing daily _ad crucem lapideam_. Probably many of these crosses had the like expiatory solemnities for persons slain there. They certainly did bury, in former days, near the Ninestone Burn, for Sir Walter Scott found there, lying among the heather, a small monumental cross, with initials, which he reverently placed upright. *Chapter XXXII* *Queen Mary and the Borders* The brief reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, was so crowded with incident that she was left with little time to visit the disturbed borderland of her kingdom. None-the-less her few visits to this district were fraught with important consequences. In 1565, when she married her cousin Lord Darnley, the head of the Douglas faction and a Roman Catholic, the Protestant nobles took up arms. In her very honeymoon she headed her soldiers, pursued the rebels to Dumfries, entered the town with a pistol in each hand, and laughed heartily at the fun of making her enemies "skip like rabbits" over the Border. She was only twenty-two years old—a fearless, dashing, attractive woman, with a clever head, a strong will, and a wild and lawless disposition. In the next year she again visited the Border, but on a very different errand. Mary had developed an extreme fancy for that bold Border Lord, the Earl of Bothwell, whose Castle of Hermitage commanded the picturesque and important valley of the Liddel. The Queen had given him authority to control the fierce Borderers; and when the earl was riding out he met the most lawless of them, Jock Elliot, of whom the couplet— "My name is little Jock Elliot And who dare meddle wi’ me?" Bothwell fired straight at Elliot with his pistol, wounding him in the leg. Elliot aimed a mighty blow at Bothwell with his two-handed sword, giving the earl so sore a wound that he was glad enough to gallop home while there was yet time to save his life. Mary was holding solemn court at Jedburgh when she heard of her favourite’s danger. She straightway took horse and rode to Hermitage, a hard cross-country ride of twenty miles, through a district infested with reckless men. When she galloped back to Jedburgh, she was in high fever and nearly died. Later on, in the misery of her long imprisonment, she often said, "Would I had died at Jedburgh!" Years later, a broken piece of a silver spur was found at Queensmire, on this difficult and dangerous road, just where Queen Mary’s horse was said to have come to grief.