When Mary Stuart was five years of age she was betrothed to the Dauphin of France, afterwards Francis II., and when she was six years old she was sent to France to be educated. She was at this time remarkable for her exquisite loveliness of form and feature and precocious intellect. Four young Scotch girls of high rank had accompanied the tiny queen from her native land, and as they were all named Mary, they were known as the “Queen’s Maries.” These Scottish maidens were Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Livingston, and Mary Fleming. When in after years one after another of these Maries married and left her service, they were replaced by others bearing the same name, as it was a fancy of the queen always to have four Maries attending her. Mary astonished the court of France and all the foreign ambassadors there assembled, when only twelve years of age, by reciting with grace and dignity a Latin oration of her own composition, before the king and a distinguished company. Her essay, written in the style of Cicero, was a plea in behalf of the “capacity of females for the highest mental acquirements in literature and the fine arts.” So beautiful was the young queen at this time that, when on Palm Sunday she, with all the princesses and ladies of the court of France, was carrying a palm branch from church, a woman in the crowd was so dazzled with the beauty and heavenly expression of Mary’s face, that she knelt at the feet of the child in rapturous admiration, exclaiming, “Are you not indeed an angel?”