indulgence meted out, perhaps too lavishly, to all its shortcomings, moral and mental. The pitiful tiny figures of baby princesses, betrothed in their very cradles, are absent for ever: the scholastic furnace is shut down, through which one emerged such a miracle of learning as Lady Jane Grey at sixteen. Two things remain intact through the ages-that undeviating maternal instinct of the child-heart, the most touching, most celestial trait of woman in the making; and that extraordinary piquancy of infantine logic, which so floors and 'stumps' the less flexibleminded parent. Probably most people are acquainted with the story of the little girl who is allowed (oh, gruesome permission!) to view her uncle in his coffin, and is told that he has gone to Heaven. Little girl, the day after the funeral: Mamma dear! do you think God has had time to unpack Uncle Edward yet?' Or again, though it should rank as a 'chestnut,' take the tale of the little girl who had picked up bad language from the grooms. The vicar, summoned by a horrified mother, remonstrates A little bird has told me that you sometimes use naughty words.' 'Oh, I know,' says Miss Pinafore promptly, 'it was one of those d-d sparrows!'

The poets have always had an adoring eye on this small epitome of woman. She appeals to their sense of humour, as in Prior's delightful verses To a Child of Quality Five Years Old to their veneration for that Age of Innocence of which the little girl is still the most ideal image, as in We are Seven and Lucy Gray. They recognise in her a power of virginal self-seclusion from gross earthly surroundings which may enable her crescent faculties to absorb and assimilate beauty-a theory summed up in the imperishable Three years she grew in sun and shower. Finally, of her they foster an ardent conviction that she alone of God's creatures may, by some inherent process of sanctity, remain unspotted from the world that her trailing clouds of glory shall never 'get a little dusty at the hem,' and that no serpent shall dare to invade the Eden of her pure white soul. Alas! I fear the poets delude themselves. The actual little girl of real life is all the more lovable for her weak humanity. Fairy-tale writers, too, who are of the poetic fellowship, make much of their little Gerdas and Snowwhites and Cinderellas. But nursery literature, austerely veracious, abounds in examples of Missy in all her most reprehensible phases-from the melancholy

parable of Red Riding Hood to the peccant Polly Flindersfrom Goldenhair, who gobbled the Three Bears' porridge, to Jemima, who stood upon her head on her little truckle-bed, and then began hurraying with her heels.' This constant attribution of original sin reaches a climax in those unhappy ones of the Fairchild Family, Lucy and Emily, whose every deed demanded a minatory sermon on the spot.

Two little girls stand out as representative children of the nineteenth century—one at either end-Marjorie Fleming and W. V. Never was there a more enchanting little sinner than Marjorie, who would have been among the first to allow that 'when she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.' Witty, wilful, sensitive, consumed by that 'wild hunger to be beloved'-never did death summon from the evil to come a soul more manifestly pre-ordained to suffering. Witness her diary, at six and seven years old:

I confess I have been more like a little young divil than a creature for when Isabella went upstairs to teach me religion and my multiplication and to be good and all my other lessons I stamped with my foot and threw my new hat which she had made on the ground and was dreadfully passionate. . . It was the very same Divil that tempted Job that tempted me I am sure, but he resisted Satan though he had boils and many other misfortunes which I have escaped. . . . I am now going to tell the horrible and wretched plaege that my multiplication gives me, you can't conceive it the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself can't endure. . . . Remorse is the worst thing to bear and I am afraid that I will fall a marter to it.

Do you suppose Scott worshipped his Maidie any the less for her poor little revolts and repentances? On the contrary, he would have endorsed W. V.'s' dictum, 'Little girls ought not to be too good. If they only did what they were told, they would be good enough.' There is not much likelihood of the brilliant erratic baby genius ever being 'too good.' As to W. V., it may be that the emotional artistic temperament of such children wears out the tender little frame before its time. Her stories and playlets and charming little nature poems-all the pathetic residuum of a lovely fugitive spirit-are on a higher level of achievement than were Pet Marjorie's attempts. But then she lived three years longer than Marjorie, and was perhaps altogether of a saner vivacity.

For the average little girl, it is advisable that her virtues be chiefly negative ones. Hence a certain air of nonentity sometimes underlies her alluring shyness. That feeble assumption of

authority by which she bullies her family to her will is but the lion's hide thrown over a natural subordination to authority. To face the probable future for her is almost unendurable-to consider that the stings of love, the pangs of motherhood, the pomps and vanities of a blatant world, even now ambush those darling feet! Yet the shades of the prison-house close round her at an earlier age than her little brother. A vague consciousness of sex inspires and prompts her: all the arts of coquetry spring suddenly to light. That mysterious terminus of matrimony, to which she dimly imagines all feminine paths as trending, invites her pensive curiosity. She interrogates her evasive elders. If my name was Jones, and I married a Duke,' says Six-Year-Old, 'would he be Mister Jones, or should I be Mrs. Duke?' 'When you die and I get married,' enquires Three-Year-Old, 'can my husband have your watch and chain?' Nobody ever quite realises what amazing problems continually find more amazing solution in those little brains, what unruly hearts are pulsing towards the catastrophes of life beneath those clean starched frocks. Upon the mind of a child

God takes the characters of fate outworn,
And writes them fair again:

but the little girl has not long to enjoy them in their primal lucidity. Too soon the flower-sweet lips of Phyllis or Dorothy become eloquent with the hideous currencies of dress-talk. Your little daughter, the child whose childishness was a perpetual delight, too soon grows aweary of her toys, and scorns the amenities of the nursery table. Education completes the disaster, scrawling her smooth mind with undecipherable legends. No longer she stitches tears into samplers, or esteems it a cardinal sin to hanker after prettier hats than her own. She is petted and caressed and sheltered; but she sheds her petals of simplicity with the passing years. In the end, it may be, she returns à ses premiers amours : the eyes of a girl of twenty will sometimes recapture the innocence of three. But the wild freshness of morning faded when she forsook her playthings, faded with that beauté du diable which was almost incredible while we watched it. The doll-years were the best.

MAY BYRON.

251

HISTORICAL MYSTERIES.

BY ANDREW LANG.

VIII. THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY.

THE singular events called 'The Gowrie Conspiracy,' or 'The Slaying of the Ruthvens,' fell out, on evidence which nobody disputes, in the following manner. On August 5, 1600, the king, James VI., was leaving the stables at the House of Falkland to hunt a buck, when the Master of Ruthven rode up and had an interview with the monarch. This occurred about seven o'clock in the morning. The Master was a youth of nineteen; he was residing with his brother, the Earl of Gowrie, aged twenty-two, at the family town house in Perth, some twelve or fourteen miles from Falkland. The interview being ended, the King followed the hounds, and the chase, 'long and sore,' ended in a kill, at about eleven o'clock, near Falkland. Thence the King and the Master, with some fifteen of the Royal retinue, including the Duke of Lennox and the Earl of Mar, rode, without any delay, to Perth. Others of the King's company followed: the whole number may have been, at most, twenty-five.

On their arrival at Perth it appeared that they had not been expected. The Earl had dined at noon, the Royal dinner was delayed till two o'clock, and after the scanty meal the King and the Master went upstairs alone, while the Earl of Gowrie took Lennox and others into his garden, bordering on the Tay, at the back of the house. While they loitered there eating cherries, a retainer of Gowrie, Thomas Cranstoun (brother of Sir John of that ilk), brought a report that the King had already mounted, and ridden off through the Inch of Perth. Gowrie called for horses, but Cranstoun told him that his horses were at Scone, across the Tay, two miles off. The gentlemen then went to the street door of the house, where the porter said that the King had not ridden away. Gowrie gave him the lie, re-entered the house, went upstairs, and, returning, assured Lennox that James had certainly departed. All this is proved on oath by Lennox, Mar, Lindores, and many other witnesses.

While the company stood in doubt, outside the gate, a turret

window above them opened, and the King looked forth, much agitated, shouting 'Treason!' and crying for help to Mar. With Lennox and most of the others, Mar ran to the rescue up the main staircase of the house, where they were stopped by a locked door, which they could not break open. Gowrie had not gone with his guests to aid the King; he was standing in the street, asking ‘What is the matter? I know nothing;' when two of the King's household, Thomas and James Erskine, tried to seize him, the treason being perpetrated under Gowrie's own roof. His friends drove the Erskines off, and some of the Murrays of Tullibardine, who were attending a wedding in Perth, surrounded him. Gowrie retreated, drew a pair of 'twin swords,' and, accompanied by Cranstoun and others, made his way into the quadrangle of his house. At the foot of a small dark staircase they saw the body of a man lying-wounded or dead. Cranstoun now rushed up the dark stairs, followed by Gowrie, two Ruthvens, Hew Moncrieff, Patrick Eviot, and perhaps others. At the head of the narrow spiral stair they found, in a room called the Gallery Chamber, Sir Thomas Erskine, a lame Dr. Herries, a young gentleman of the Royal Household named John Ramsay, and Wilson, a servant, with drawn swords. A fight began; Cranstoun was wounded; he and his friends fled, leaving Gowrie, who had been run through the body by Ramsay. All this while the other door of the long Gallery Chamber was ringing under the hammer-strokes of Lennox and his company, and the town bell was summoning the citizens. Erskine and Ramsay now locked the door opening on the narrow stair, at which the retainers of Gowrie struck with axes. King's party, by means of a hammer handed by their friends through a hole in the other door of the gallery, forced the lock, and admitted Lennox, Mar, and the rest of the King's retinue. They let James out of a small turret opening from the Gallery Chamber, and, after some dealings with the angry mob and the magistrates of Perth, they conveyed the King to Falkland after nightfall.

The

The whole results were the death of Gowrie and of his brother, the Master (his body it was that lay at the foot of the narrow staircase), and a few wounds to Ramsay, Dr. Herries, and some of Gowrie's retainers.

The death of the Master of Ruthven was explained thus:-When James cried Treason!' young Ramsay, from the stable door, had heard his voice, but not his words. He had sped into the quad