“Off with his head!” exclaimed Wedderburn, who at the same instant reached the spot.  The bloody mandate was readily obeyed; and Home, taking the bleeding head in his hand, cut off the flaxen tresses, and tied them as a trophy to his saddle-bow.  The body of the Chevalier de la Beaute was rudely buried on the spot where he fell.  A humble stone marks out the scene of the tragedy, and the people in the neighbourhood yet call it “Bawty’s Grave.”  The head of the Chevalier was carried to Dunse, where it was fixed upon a spear at the cross, and Wedderburn exclaimed, “Thus be exalted the enemies of the house of Home!”

The bloody relic was then borne in triumph to Home Castle, and placed upon the battlements.  “There,” said Sir David, “let the Regent climb when he returns from France for the head of his favourite; it is thus that Home of Wedderburn revenges the murder of his kindred.”

THE STORY OF THE PELICAN.

Though not so much a tradition as a memory still fresh probably in the minds of some of the good old Edinburgh folks, we here offer, chiefly for the benefit of our young female readers who are fond of a story wherein little heroines figure, as in Beranger’s Sylphide, an account of a very famous adventure of a certain little Jeannie Deans in our city—­the more like the elder Jeannie, inasmuch as they both were concerned in a loving effort to save the life of a sister.  Whereunto, as a very necessary introduction, it behoves us to set forth that there was, some sixty years ago, more or less, a certain Mr. William Maconie, who was a merchant on the South Bridge of Edinburgh, but who, for the sake of exercise and fresh air—­a commodity this last he need not have gone so far from the Calton Hill to seek—­resided at Juniper Green, a little village three or four miles from St. Giles’s.  Nor did this distance incommode him much, seeing that he had the attraction to quicken his steps homewards of a pretty young wife and two little twin daughters, Mary and Annie, as like each other as two rosebuds partially opened, and as like their mother, too, as the objects of our simile are to themselves when full blown.

Peculiar in this respect of having twins at the outset, and sisters too—­a good beginning of a contract to perpetuate the species—­Mr. Maconie was destined to be even more so, inasmuch as there came no more of these pleasant deliciae domi, at least up to the time of our curious story—­a circumstance the more to be regretted by the father, in consequence of a strange fancy (never told to his wife) that possessed him of wishing to insure the lives of his children as they came into the world, or at least after they had got through the rather uninsurable period of mere infant life.  And in execution of this fancy—­a very fair and reasonable one, and not uncommon at that time, whatever it may be now, when people are not so provident—­he had got an insurance to the extent of five hundred pounds effected in the Pelican Office—­perhaps the most famous at that time—­on the lives of the said twins, Mary and Annie, who were, no doubt, altogether unconscious of the importance they were thus made to hold in the world.