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And the old woman would recite, in her deep musical and indeed beautiful voice,

'The Scottish spearmen still made good their dark impenetrable wood, Each man stepping where his comrade stood the instant that he fell.'

But of all the tales so grimly told to Mary Stuart by the history-and-legend-steeped crone, the piteous death of King Charles I made the deepest impression, an impression strengthened, rendered even deeper and more indelible by a picture that hung in the hall of her father's house, of the brave King standing on a snow-covered scaffold, calmly and courageously facing death at the hands of his... murderers--foul, base, black-hearted, treacherous murderers, according to old Elspeth Stuart.

Thus it is not remarkable that Miss Mary Stuart grew up not only a fanatic loyalist and devoted upholder of the monarchical principle, but a Legitimist, a White Rose Leaguer, and an almost worshipping devotee of the Martyr King.

Her favourite holidays were the pilgrimages she made to places historically interesting in connection with King Charles; visits to Carisbrooke, to Whitehall, to Windsor, to Oxford, to the battlefields of the Civil War.