It happened to be the crisp, lovely, truly Scottish time, October, and Mary opened court at Jedburgh October 9, presiding at the meetings of the Privy Council, and then rode to the Hermitage October 16. She rode with an escort which included the Earl of Moray, the Earl of Huntley, Mr. Secretary Lethington, and more men of less note. For six days the girl queen (Mary was only twenty-four in this year of the birth of James, year before the death of Darnley, the marriage with Bothwell, the imprisonment at Loch Leven) had been mewed to state affairs, and a ride through the brown October woods, thirty miles there and thirty miles back again, must have lured the queen who was always keen for adventure, whether Bothwell was the goal, or just adventure. [Illustration: HERMITAGE CASTLE.] The mist of the morning turned to thick rain by night, and the return ride was made in increasing wet and darkness. Once, riding ahead and alone and rapidly, the Queen strayed from the trail, was bogged in a mire, known to-day as the Queen's Mire, and rescued with difficulty. Next day Mary lay sick at Jedburgh, a sickness of thirty days, nigh unto death. News was sent to Edinburgh, and bells were rung, and prayers offered in St. Giles. On the ninth day she lay unconscious, in this little town of Jedburgh, apparently dead, twenty years before Fotheringay. "Would God I had died at Jedburgh." She did not die. Darnley visited her one day, coming from Glasgow. Bothwell came as soon as he could be moved, and the two made convalescence together in this old house of Jedburgh, perhaps the happiest house of all those where the legend of Mary persists. Even to-day it has its charm. The windowed turret looks out on the large fruit garden that stretches down to the Jed, very like that very little turret of "Queen Mary's Lookout" at Roscoff where the child queen had landed in France less than twenty years before. Five years later, when Mary was in an English prison, a proclamation was read in her name at the town cross of Jedburgh, the herald was roughly handled by the Provost who received his orders from England, and Buccleuch and Ker of Fernihurst revenged themselves by hanging ten loyal (?) citizens who stood with the Provost. Later, a century later, when at the town cross the magistrates were drinking a health to the new sovereign, a well-known Jacobite came by. They insisted on his joining in the toast. And he pledged--"confusion to King William, and the restitution of our sovereign and the heir!" Bravo, the Borderers! _Selkirk_