For some time the Queen was understood to have contemplated a journey to the land of those Stuart ancestors by virtue of whose Tudor blood they, and the Brunswick line through them, and she through it, inherited the British crown. In the autumn of this year all seemed propitious for the journey, and it was undertaken accordingly by herself and her young husband. Their first destination was the Scottish capital, and as the railway system connecting the southern and northern extremities of the island was yet far from complete, the journey was made by water from the Thames to the Forth, the port of embarkation being Woolwich, and of debarkation, Granton, a minor harbour in the immediate neighbourhood of Edinburgh. The expected visit was awaited and prepared for in the North with the utmost eagerness of expectancy. Half Scotland seemed to have emptied itself into the metropolis to do her honour. In their preparations, burgher vied with noble, tartan-clad Highlanders with Lowlanders in their more sombre blue bonnets and hodden grey. On the 29th of August, the Queen left Windsor, and proceeded to Woolwich, where she embarked amid the acclamations of her metropolitan and Kentish subjects at an early hour of the same day. In a Royal yacht, towed by a steam ship of war, the voyage was safely effected in the fine weather and on the placid wave of early autumn. In due time the Royal squadron arrived off Dunbar, which, with the Bass Rock and Tantallon Castle, form together a fine _coup-d'oeil_ of romantic coast scenery and middle age antiquity, at the mouth of the Firth of Forth. Here it was met by large steamers filled by welcomers from Edinburgh and its neighbourhood, who greeted their illustrious visitors with loud huzzahs, and the strains of that National Anthem, which, though of English birth, was chaunted right lustily by Scottish lungs and lips. It was observed that Her Majesty, who came on board and acknowledged the vivas of her subjects, had paid the Scots the compliment of enveloping herself in a Paisley shawl; and when, a day or two later, she made her formal entry past the church sanctified by the preaching of John Knox, to the Castle, in a narrow chamber of which her unfortunate ancestor Queen Mary bore her son King James, she wore, with even more conspicuously appropriate taste, a shawl of Stuart tartan. [Sidenote: LANDING ON SCOTTISH SOIL.]