The other cupola is decorated by the hand of Alexander Runciman, with scenes from the life of St. Margaret of Scotland, whose history furnished only the other year a subject for the brush of another of the most imaginative of our Scottish painters, Sir Noel Paton. Curiously enough we can find no single reference to this important St. Margaret series in any of the biographies of Runciman, or in the anonymous pamphlet, published in 1773, which so elaborately describes the ceiling of the Ossian Hall. Both series are executed in oil colours upon the plaster. Here the decorations consist of four oval compartments, each occupied with a scene from the life of the Queen. The first shows “The Landing of St. Margaret.” Its background is a rich blue sky, and a distance of stormy sea. In the centre is King Malcolm, clad in a broad Scottish bonnet with a little white plume, red knee-breeches, white hose and white shoes with ample rosettes, and with a red cloak flapping around him in voluminous folds. With one hand he leads the lady, robed in a yellow mantle and a white dress, her long yellow hair tossed by the wind, and with the other points energetically towards the church before them, where white-robed monks, with clasped hands, are awaiting their arrival. The second subject is “The Royal Wedding.” The pair are being united by a venerable and aged ecclesiastic with a grey beard, whose bronzed, weather-beaten countenance tells splendidly against his elaborate white vestments. To his right is the King, crowned and robed in red, placing the ring on the hand of the Queen, who stands draped in gold-brocaded white and green. An altar appears to our right, and beside it a mail-clad knight, with head bowed in worship. The figures of women are introduced to our left, and white flowers and a steaming censer lie on the ruddy marble pavement beneath. The third subject shows the manner of the saint’s queenship. She is known to her people in the breaking of bread; clad in the same robes that she wore at the marriage festival, she is feeding the poor, and her husband, in his red mantle and wearing his royal crown, follows in attendance upon her, bearing a heaped platter. The fourth subject shows the final development of Queen Margaret’s saintship. Having on earth filled herself with the life of heaven, she is now seen, white-clad, and with a red robe falling from her shoulders like the mortal life that she is done with, ascending inevitably into skies, where the clouds dispart to disclose the benignant figure of the Almighty Father and the white shape of the Holy Dove. Beneath is outspread a familiar landscape which she is leaving for ever—the Fifeshire hills appear on the right on the farther side of the Firth, and beneath is the town of Edinburgh, with the Palace, and the Castle rock crested with her chapel, and to the left the Pentlands which overlook Penicuik, with a kindly ray streaming from above, and irradiating their summit.