The next indication of date is in paragraphs 7, 8. Paragraph 7 ends: ‘The morne I wil speik to him upon this point’ (part of the affair of Hiegait); paragraph 8 is written on the following day: ‘As to the rest of Willie Hiegait’s, he’ (Darnley) ‘confessit it, bot it was the morne efter my cumming or he did it.’ The English is, ‘The rest as [to?] Wille Hiegait [he?] hath confessed, but it was the next day that he’ (Darnley) ‘came hither,’ that is, came so far on in his confession. Paragraph 8, therefore, tells the results of that examination of Darnley, which Mary promised at the end of paragraph 7 to make ‘to-morrow.’ We are now in a new day, January 22, at night. But, while paragraphs 9, 10, 11 (about 500 words) intervene, paragraph 12 opens thus, ‘_This is my first journey_’ (day’s work); ‘_I will end to-morrow_. I write all, of how little consequence so ever it be, to the end you may take of the whole that shall be best for your purpose. I do here a work that I hate much, _but I had begun it this morning_.’[339] Here, then, after 500 words confessedly written on her _second_ night, Mary says that this is her _first_ day’s work. The natural theory is that here we detect clumsy dovetailing by a forger, who has cut a genuine letter into pieces, and inserted false matter. But another explanation may be suggested. Mary, on her first night, did not really stop at paragraph 7: ‘I will talk to him to-morrow on that point.’ _These words happened to come at the foot of her sheet of paper._ She took up another fresh page, and wrote on, ‘This is my first journey ...’ down to ‘I had begun it this morning.’ Then she stopped and went to bed. Next night (January 22) she took up the same sheet or page as she had written three sentences on, the evening before, but _she took it up on the clean side_, and did not observe her words ‘This is my first journey.... I had begun it this morning’ till she finished, and turned over the clean side. She then probably ran her pen lightly across the now inappropriate words, written on the previous night, ‘This is my first journey,’ as she erased lines in her draft for a sonnet in the Bodleian Library.[340] The words, as in the case of the sonnet in the Bodleian, remained perfectly legible, and the translators--not intelligent men--included them in their versions. The letter should run from paragraph 7, ‘I will talk to him to-morrow upon that point’ to paragraph 12, ‘This is my first journey.... I had begun it this morning.’ Then back to paragraph 8, ‘As to the rest of Willie Hiegait’s,’ and so straight on, merely omitting the words written on the previous night, ‘This is my first journey, ... but I had begun it this morning.’ Mary’s mistake in taking for virgin a piece of paper which really had writing on the verso, must have occurred to most people: certainly it has often occurred to myself.