Such are the main historic features of the story. The inwoven incidents make us acquainted with many of the customs of humble life which pertain to the close of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century. It portrays the ancient observances of St. Valentine’s Day; the fierce conflict of two Highland clans; the bitter jealousy between the Black Douglas and the Earl of March; the trial by Bier-Right in the Church of St. John; the government of Scottish towns and burroughs; the hardihood of the brave burghers who knew their rights, and had the courage to maintain them. It reveals the dissipation of the Court, led on by the much-loved but dissipated son of the king, the Duke of Rothsay, over whom the father mourned, even as David over his son Absalom. Through this black serge-cloth of history runs a silver thread—the life of Catharine Glover. Her bold and resolute lover, Henry Gow, a smith and armorer by trade, who had the good fortune of being her Valentine, seems too warlike for her gentle and amiable character, or as Harry sums it up briefly in a blunt sentence: “She thinks the whole world is one great minster church, and that all who live in it should behave as if they were at an eternal mass.” The romance abounds with many eloquent passages and poetic touches; even the bold armorer, with his love for hard blows, reveals here and there a touch of sentiment, as where he returns to Perth from a long journey and says: “When I crossed the Wicks and saw the bonny city lie fairly before me, like a fairy queen in romance, whom the knight finds asleep among a wilderness of flowers, I felt even as a bird, when it folds its weary wings to stoop down on its own nest.” The description of the burial of the Highland Chief is the sketch of a master. We are transported to the rugged hills of the northern Highlands. Around us rise lofty mountain peaks; below us stretches the silver expanse of Loch Tay; the black-bannered flotilla carrying the dead leader, Mac Ian, with oars moving to wild music, holds its course to the ruined cathedral of the Holy Isle, where still slumbers the daughter of Henry the First of England, wife of Alexander the First of Scotland. “The monks issue from their lowly portal; the bells peal their death-toll over the long lake; a yell bursts from the assembled multitude, in which the deep shout of warriors, and the shrill wail of females join their notes with the tremulous voice of age, and the babbling cry of childhood; the deer start from their glens for miles around and seek the distant recesses of the mountains, even the domestic animals, accustomed to the voice of man, flee from their pastures into morasses and dingles.”