On the green velvet bank which slopes up from a little tributary of the Davinloch—a place where the winter grass grows rank, but where the white daisies spot the summer turf—are two long gravestones lying side by side, and somewhat apart from all the rest.
They cover the graves of two lovers.
Every person who passes through Cromar (as that part of Aberdeenshire is named) is taken to see them, for there is a sad story connected with them—a story which, to this hour, throws an occasional dash of sentimentality over the village girls and bonneted ploughmen, and which was long the theme of many a sad and many a dirge-like song. One of those stones was inscribed with a legend which I cannot give here, as Kœningheim's handwriting became so tremulous as to be illegible. On the other is carved a Scottish sword, with the words:
Heir Lyis Kenneth Logie—ane honorabill man.
The history of these sequestered tombs, is the history of Kœningheim's misfortunes and his crime.
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In the sixteenth century, nearly the whole property of the now suppressed parish of Logie, in Mar, belonged to two families, the Gordons of Colstaine, and the Donaldsons of Culbleine—a vast forest. The dwelling of the former, named the Moat of Colstaine, was a strong square fortalice, surrounded by a barbican wall, which stood in the midst of a morass, not far from the little kirkyard holm which I have just described. A river (now shrunk to a runnel) washed this barbican on one side; a wet ditch defended it on the other.
The residence of the Donaldsons was an old Scottish manor-house or Place, having grated windows with loopholed-sills, vaulted apartments, and turrets at the angles. It stood among some fine old sycamores and oaks, on the moorland; and now my reader's eye may rest on the three leading features of the parish of Logie, as they appeared in the year of grace 1594; the grey old kirk of St. Woloc, with its graves dotting the green holm, its buttressed wall begirt with hawthorn hedges, and shaded by dark yew-trees, where the gled croaked by day and the owl screamed by night; lower down on the waterside, the strong tower with its broad chimneys and stone roofs, its grated casements and corbelled rampart; the great dule-tree before its gate—an ash that was seldom without its "tassel," in the shape of a thief from the south, or a Forbes hung in his boots, as the good people phrased it then; the old baronial manor on the lea, half hidden among dark green copsewood, with the smoke of its hall and spence, kitchen, bake and brewhouses ascending into the air.
In those days, the minister of the Kirk, the gudeman of the Place, and the laird of the Tower, were the three undoubted dignitaries of the parish; and when we remember that it was an age when the minister was (in his own estimation) a greater man than ever Cardinal Beaton dared to be; when the gudeman brought four-and-eighty horsemen, "weel boden in effeir of war," to the sheriff's quarterly Weaponshow; and that the laird marched thrice that number, and had moreover the power of sending half the country-side to pit or gallows, it must be allowed that the power of these three potentates in 1594, was infinitely greater than that enjoyed now by the Premier Duke of Scotland.
Let us go back twenty years.