The keen and cruel frost Has touched my world with blight, And dark on all its splendors lie, The shadows of the night. The memory of its joy, Like billows of the sea, Come surging up the silver strand, Then backward moaning flee.
Amid this sombre calm, Beneath these skies of gray, And drifting of the yellow leaves I walk alone to-day, And scarce can look beyond The shadows cold and drear, That fold, away from mortal sight, The summer of my year.
In the eternal spring, Beyond time’s changing skies, Beyond the chilling frost of death, A resurrection lies. I can not tell how long, The snow shall wrap their tomb, But sometime, shall life’s blighted flowers Burst into splendid bloom.
One hundred years have passed away since Richard the Lion-hearted, Ivanhoe and Robin Hood met at the “Joyous passage of arms at Ashby.” Our next story, “Castle Dangerous,” opens upon days even more bitter and warlike; Scotland is rent with bitter feuds. The daughter of King Alexander the Third died in 1291, and no fewer than twelve persons claimed the throne. King Edward of England was chosen arbiter. He took advantage of sectional discord and endeavored to make Scotland subject to the English crown. He found a willing instrument in the person of John Baliol, who basely acknowledged himself vassal and subject. King Edward further demanded the surrender of three powerful castles, Berwick, Roxburgh and Jedburgh; but the people murmured and Baliol was compelled to do battle with Edward. Under this weak and treacherous leader the Scottish army was defeated in a great battle near Dunbar in 1296. Edward marched through Scotland at the head of a powerful army. He removed to London the records of the Scottish Kingdom, carried the great stone of Scone, upon which the Scottish Kings had been crowned for centuries, to Westminster Abbey, and placed the government of Scotland in the hands of John de Warrene, Earl of Surrey.
At this juncture a leader arose in the person of Sir William Wallace, the son of a private gentleman, and in no way related to the nobility of the kingdom. His glorious struggle kept alive the spark of Scottish liberty. He gathered to himself a band of brave men, and defeated the English army near Stirling. The Scottish people, as they had no king, chose him Protector, and he was titled Sir William Wallace, Governor of the Scottish Nation. He was defeated, captured by a traitor, brought to trial in the great hall of William Rufus in Westminster, sentenced to death as an outlaw, his body divided into four quarters and placed on London bridge.