What were the poet’s dreams in that short welcome rest? Did he anticipate the great change, and fancy his spirit already free from its prison, wandering through those unknown regions which good Eneas, and rich Tullus and Ancus, and your grandfather and mine, and a host of those we both knew and valued, and would have followed into any danger, or on any expedition, have ere this thoroughly explored--to which you and I, though we think so little about it, are bound just as surely and inevitably, and with which to-morrow, or the day after, or this time next year, we may be familiarly acquainted? Or did he retrograde to the past, and revel and ruffle it at Holyrood once more, riding the sorrel horse alongside of ‘Black Agnes,’ and sunning himself in the bright eyes of the Maries, and above all the smiles of her their peerless Queen? Perhaps a vision of that face he had worshipped so fondly shone on him for the last time kindlier and lovelier than it had ever appeared in reality, and to wake from such a dream as that was so bitter that even death became welcome as promising sleep again. The knocking on the scaffolding failed to arouse him, and when Ogilvy went gently into his cell with a torch, the soldier passed the light half-pitifully, half-admiringly, over the manly face that could look so calm and peaceful at such a time. And in the royal house in the south street, within a culverin’s distance of the castle, were all the inmates sleeping soundly at the dawn of that gloomy morning? Was that a bed of rest, on each post of which was carved a crown, and at the head of which the arms of Scotland were emblazoned so richly in embroidery and cloth of gold? Was the lovely face, so flushed and troubled, thus buried in the pillows to exclude the light of day; were the white hands pressed against the throbbing temples and covering the beautiful little ears, in dread of the morning gun which would be fired at sunrise, and tell that all was over? It was no fault of Mary Stuart’s that Chastelâr was doomed. All that lay in her power had been done to save him; all that royal dignity and womanly shame would permit. Perhaps she believed him to have escaped even at the last; she would hardly guess at such infatuation as he had shown even in _him_, and yet the victim’s sleep had probably been far sounder than hers for whom he was about to die. Lights were burning in the Queen’s chamber, heavy curtains at the window excluded the faintest glimpse of dawn, yet she was turning and tossing restlessly on her couch, while Chastelâr was pacing in grave composure up the dungeon-stair that led into the gray morning, the last he would see on earth.