HIGHLAND AND LOWLAND
Many ways lead out of Perth, but best of these is the foot-path way,
picked up anywhere in the Highlands. By rail the road leads down to the
sea, past Glamis Castle, built in 1500, where the room is shown in which
Duncan was murdered in 1000, although Shakespeare says it was at
Inverness; and to Kirriemuir, if one would match the "Bonnie Brier Bush"
with "The Window in Thrums." Or by rail the road leads to the lakes of
the West, and to the Highlands of the North.
For one short space I took it northward to the Pass of Killiecrankie,
almost in fear, as a regiment of English mercenaries is said to have
been a-feared in the Forty Five, three-quarters of a century after
Killiecrankie. For here in a last splendid moment, Graham of
Claverhouse, Viscount of Dundee, and sometime Bonnie Dundee, was killed,
the battle having gone gloriously his way, for the glorious cause of
Stewart and _mon droit_--some say by a silver bullet, the devil
having charmed the leaden bullets that were showered against his magic
life; those who say it are Whigs.
[Illustration: GLAMIS CASTLE.]
Always called Bonnie Dundee by those of us who care for romance. To
quote from Samuel Crothers, "And you say they are the same? I cannot
make them seem the same. To me there are two of them: Graham of
Claverhouse, whom I hate, and the Bonnie Dundee, whom I love. If it's
all the same to you, I think I shall keep them separate, and go on
loving and hating as aforetime."
The Pass is lovely enough, on a summer morning, with the sun shining
fair on the Highlands, the blue hills misty in the distance, the trees
thick green on both sides the bending Garry, and not a living thing in
view, nothing which belongs to the Duke of Atholl who owns everything
hereabout, except the air and the beauty and the memory, which I packed
in my Pilgrim's Wallet.
Because the Duke owns the cathedral I did not claim any memory beside
the dust of Bonnie Dundee--
"Fling open the Westport and let me gae free."
And now, to a certain defeat which I suffered near the Pass of
Killiecrankie, when I "cam by Athole." I was without a philabeg. If I
had had it--it sounds so enhearteningly like usquebaugh--I think my
courage would have been great enough to do the thing I had crossed over
seas to do--to walk from Blair Athole through Glen Tilt and between the
great lift of the Cairngorms, to Braemar. I had felt that I owed it to
Scottish ancestors and to those who had lost in the Risings.
I remembered that Queen Mary had longed to be a man. When she had come
into this North to punish Huntley, so the Scottish calendar states, "She
repenteth of nothing, but when the lords and others came in the morning
from the watch, that she was not a man to know what life it was to lie
all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a jack and a
knapschall (helmet), a Glasgow buckler, and a broadsword." Her father's
errant soul was hers. And once she ventured it, but in fear of her life,
when she fled from the wraith of Darnley, to the scandalizing of the
mongers, "Her Majestie, in mennis claithes, buttit and spurrit, departed
that samin nicht of Borthwick to Dunbar, quhairof no man knew saif my
Lord Duke and sum of his servants, wha met Her Majestie a myll off
Borthwick and conveyed her hieness to Dunbar."
[Illustration: GLEN TILT.]
I added another Scottish defeat. For it was excessively warm that
summer, and Scotland can be as warm and as dry as Kansas. It is thirty
miles, the mountain way. There is no inn. There is possibility--there is
danger--of losing the way. There are no wolves, I suppose, and certainly
no Wolf of Badenoch. But there were the unknown terrors.
So we walked a certain stent into Glen Tilt, enough to know that it is
wild, gloomy, one of the strangest wildest places, Ben-y-Gloe, the
"Mountain of the Mist," rising out of the early morning mist, yet not so
mysteriously or majestically as the Mountain Going to the Sun. But no
valley in our Mountain West has ever seemed more empty. And I suppose
since Pictish time this glen has been deserted. There were deer, red
deer, that thought they were free, and who looked out of their coverts
indifferently. We had not the heart to tell them that they belonged,
body and soul, to the Duke of Atholl. After the Porteous riots, Queen
Caroline, presiding in the place of George who was absent in his
favourite Hanover, threatened "to turn Scotland into a hunting field."
The Duke of Argyle thereupon hinted that he would have to "return to
look after my hounds." Queen Caroline seems sovereign to-day. And
especially on August eleventh, the day before St. Grouse Day, there is
an ominous quiet.
So we returned by way of Coupar Angus--meekly remembering the proverb,
"he that maun to Coupar, maun to Coupar." Here we changed cars, nearly
losing the train, because we were so engrossed in watching the loading
of the luggage, the Scotch porter cheering on his assistant, "we're twa
strong men, haud awa, let's be canny." And in the great gold sunset that
was like the glory of God upon the heavenly Highlands.
We came to Blairgowrie, where we heard in the twilight on the hills
above the town a bird of magic such as I have never heard elsewhere. Was
it a nightingale, or a night lark? It sang like these.
Next morning we took coach across these great hills, by way of Glenshee,
a very lovely way of going, and not to be regretted, in its dashing
splendour of a coach and six--except that it was not a thirty-mile walk.
But it is to be historically remembered, because it is the way Mar's men
came down to the Strath of Tay, and brought the Rising into the
Lowlands. We would go to meet them.
It was a memorable day. Not even the Simplon pass taken on a June day
when the road ran between fresh coach-out-topping walls of glittering
snow can make one forget the road over the Spittal of Glenshee. There
were impossibly purple mountains, indigo-deep, deeper purple than any
hills I have ever seen, so does the ripened heather dye the distances
more deeply. There were rocky glens, great loneliness, a mansion here
and there only just on leaving Blairgowrie, Tullyveolan, of course;
scarce a cottage even on the roadside; once a flock of sheep, near the
Spittal, being worked by Scotch collies, with an uncanny, or, canny,
second sense to get the master's direction. There was lunch at the
Spittal, a one-time Hospice, like that on the Simplon. And I wondered if
the song ran of this lovely little glen set in the midst of so much
primeval world--
"O wharawa got ye that auld crookit penny,
For ane o' bright gowd wad ye niffer wi' me?
Richt fou are baith ends o' my green silken wallet,
And braw will your hame be in bonnie Glenshee.
"For a' the bricht gowd in your green silken wallet
I never wad niffer my crookit bawbee."
The road at the top of the world runs smoothly enough. But when the
Devil's elbow is reached, a tremendous and dangerous turn in the road,
every one dismounts from the coach, and the sight of an adventurous
motor car coming down the turn does not decrease one's sense of peril.
_Braemar_
And then the sight of Braemar, and a consciousness that if you are about
to spend more money at the Fife Arms or the Invercauld than any but
royalty has a right to spend--royalty not having earned it--the
adventure has been worth it.
And to have forgotten but as the coach flashes by to read the tablet--
"Here Robert Louis Stevenson lived in the summer of 1881, and wrote
'Treasure Island.'"
this is to be home again.
Of course our first pilgrimage was to the Invercauld Arms, where we
again set up the standard on the braes of Mar. It was here that Malcolm
Canmore instituted the Highland Gathering which persists to this day.
And here, under cover of the hunt, so did the loyal Jacobites conceal
their intention, the Rising of the Fifteen was planned--and the hunters
became the hunted.
[Illustration: INVERCAULD HOUSE.]
It was evening, it was the Highlands, the great circle of mountains
lay round about. And if King James VIII and III had been defeated these
two hundred years, and dead a lesser time, and our loyalty had always
been to the Prince who came rather to establish his father than himself,
the Fifteen seemed like yesterday. In this remote high corner of the
world anything is possible, even the oblivion of time. It seemed very
vital, that faraway moment, which in truth few persons to-day take into
reckoning; even history recks little of it. But very near in this
illusory twilight--was that the Fiery Cross that glimmered in the
darkness?
"The standard on the braes o' Mar
Is up and streaming rarely;
The gathering pipe on Lochnagar
Is sounding loud and clearly.
The Highlandmen frae hill and glen,
In martial hue, wi' bonnets blue,
Wi' belted plaids and burnished blades,
Are coming late and early.
"Wha' wadna join our noble chief,
The Drummond and Glengarry?
Macgregor, Murray, Rollo, Keith,
Panmure and gallant Harry,
Macdonald's men, Clanranald's men,
Mackenzie's men, Macgilvrary's men,
Strathallan's men, the Lowland men
Of Callander and Airlie."
Next day we met a gentleman we forever call "The Advocate of Aberdeen."
In any event the lawyers of Aberdeen have styled themselves "Advocates"
since so addressed by King James. We did not know that when we named
him, but we preferred it to any Sandy or "Mac" he might legally carry.
Having been informed by him that our name was Lowland and we were
entitled to none of the thrills of the Highlands, we failed to mount
farther than the third stage of the Morrone Hill. The wind blew a gale
from the nor'nor'west, like those better known to us from the
sou'sou'west. It was humiliating to have the Advocate of Aberdeen
instruct us when we returned that if we had gone on we might have proved
our Highland blood.
We did not attempt Ben MacDui, although it may be approached by the
ever-easy way of pony-back, even the queen--not Mary--having mounted it
in this fashion. We were content to master, almost master, its
pronunciation according to the pure Gaelic--Muich Dhui. And then we
learned that by more accurate and later scientific measurement, MacDui
is not the tallest mountain in the kingdom, but Ben Nevis out-tops it.
To make our peace with an almost forfeited fate, we took a dander, that
is, we walked back toward Glen Tilt by the way we had not come. There is
a happy little falls a couple of miles from the town, Corrimulzie,
plunging down a long fall through a deep narrow gorge, but very
pleasantly. We passed white milestone after white milestone, measured in
particular Scottish accuracy--we timed ourselves to a second and found
we could measure the miles by the numbers of our breaths. The forest is
thick and bosky, not an original forest, doubtless. But I was reminded
that Taylor, on his Pennyless Pilgrimage came to Braemar three hundred
years ago, and wrote "as many fir trees growing there as would serve for
masts (from this time to the end of the worlde) for all the shippes,
caracks, hoyes, galleyes, boates, drumiers, barkes, and water-crafte,
that are now, or can be in the worlde these fourty yeeres." He lamented
the impossibility of sending them down to tide water where they might
meet their proper fate.
Only once did we meet a carriage in which we suspected that royalty, or
at least ladies-in-waiting--if Duke's wives who are royal have such
appendages--might be sitting.
And on to the Linn of Dee, which is truly a marvelous place. The
Advocate of Aberdeen when we had asked him why so many of his townfolk
came this way, explained with a sense of possession of the greater Dee,
"we like to see what the Dee can do." Surely it can do it. In these rock
walls it has spent centuries carving for itself fantastic ways, until
not the Dalles of the St. Croix can excel its rock-bound fantasy. Given
time, the Dee can "do" pretty much as it pleases in granite.
The few miles we ventured beyond the Linn were enough to prove that the
way was long, the wind was cold, the minstrel was infirm and old. Had we
walked all the mountain way we should have been much in need of a
"plaidie to the angry airts." This air is very bracing.
But we sang many Jacobite songs in memory of the Risings. "Wha'll be
King but Charlie?" and "Charlie is my Darling," and "Over the sea
Charlie is coming to me," and "Will ye no come back again." And we sang
with particular satisfaction that we were not, after all, to suffer
royal wrongs--surely there is a falling away in the far generations in
the far places, since a King's son could so adventure--
"Dark night cam' on, the tempest roar'd,
Loud o'er the hills and valleys,
An' where was't that your Prince lay down
Who's hame should been a palace?
He row'd him in a Highland plaid,
Which cover'd him but sparely,
An' slept beneath a bush o' broom,
Oh, wae's me for Prince Charlie."
On these braes of Mar, and in these hills and beside these very streams,
the Prince made his adventure--yes, and simply because of that adventure
will be forever remembered by those who believe in the heroic mood.
[Illustration: BALMORAL CASTLE.]
To leave Braemar the road leads down to Ballater, with motor cars to
take it swiftly; past the castles of Mar old and new, where betimes sits
the present Earl of Mar, not conning Risings but writing to the
magazines his idea of a free Scotland, which shall have its Home Rule
like Ireland--which was once Scotland--and which may have it at the
great peace; down through an increasingly pleasant country. Balmoral
Castle looks deserted now of its queen--and when queens desert, places
are much emptier than when kings leave. But "queen's weather" is still
possible here, even though the castle and our way are overshadowed by
Lochnagar, on which we bestow more than passing glance in memory of that
Gordon who was Lord Byron.
"Ah! there my young footsteps in infancy wander'd;
My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid;
On chieftains long perished my memory ponder'd,
As daily I strove through the pine-cover'd glade;
I sought not my home till the day's dying glory
Gave place to the rays of the bright polar star;
For fancy was cheer'd by traditional story,
Disclosed by the natives of dark Loch na Garr."
And one glance at Lumphanan-- "This Macbeth then slew they there in the
wood of Lumphanan," so runs the old chronicle.
_Aberdeen_
There is no city in Scotland which seems to me to have more personality,
a more distinct personality, than Aberdeen. It is plainly a
self-sufficient city, and both in politics and in religion it thinks for
itself, mindless if its thinking is not that of the rest of the kingdom.
Its provost cannot leave its borders; once he attended a battle, many
and many a year ago, nineteen miles from the city at Harlow, and sad to
say, he was killed. So now the provost remains in the city, he cannot
leave it more than President can leave Republic, or Pope the Vatican.
[Illustration: MARISCHAL COLLEGE.]
In religion, Aberdeen is strongly Episcopalian, where it is not
Catholic. In truth there is a band of Catholicism running across the
country, from Aberdeen to Skye, through the heart of the Highlands. As
might be expected, the Highlands never yielded to the reformatory
methods of John Knox, but remained of the faith.
There is no city that looks so Scottish, and yet so different, as
Aberdeen. It is a dignified and an extraordinarily clean city. After a
rain its granite glitters as though it had been newly cut, and to one
accustomed to smoke-grimed American cities Aberdeen looks as though it
were built this morning, when no doubt much of this granite has a right
to the hoar of antiquity.
Marischal College, founded by the Keiths, who were Earl Marischals,
boasts of being the greatest granite pile in the world, after the
Escorial. Having walked a day through a circumscribed portion of that
Spanish granite, I chose to limit my footsteps in Marischal college.
Only to verify the stone did I enter. And there it stood, over the
doorway of the inner entrance hall, that stone which gives me a certain
ancestral right of hauteur--
Thay half said.
Quhat say thay?
Lat thame say.
Scots are astonishingly fond of mottoes. They carve them, like Orlando's
verse, if not on every tree, on every lintel and over every fireplace;
from _Nemo me impune lacessit_ of the royal thistle race, to every clan
and every cottage.
King's College (1495) is an older foundation than Marischal (1593), and
where once they were rivals, since the Eighteen Sixties they have been
harmonized, and since Mr. Carnegie gave them his benefaction, education
is free in this University of Aberdeen. King's College, if not the next
greatest granite pile, has a stone cross, which is the typical capping
of noble edifice in Scotland; in truth it begins at Newcastle on Tyne
when one enters the English beginning of the Border.
The cathedral of St. Machar's, first founded by the saint who was a
disciple of Columba, was refounded by the saint who was David I--of
course; what a busy saint this was--and looks the part of age, but of
strength rather than arrogance, with its low lying towers.
There is an old town even in the new town, and the contrast is sharp. If
one gets lost, turns suddenly into this old part, it is a curious
experience. The buildings look medieval, French provincial, and the
people look strange and foreign; also they treat you, a foreigner, with
all that curiosity, and something of that disrespect which you, of
course, deserve, having interloped into their sanctuary. The Duke of
Cumberland lived here for six weeks before advancing on Culloden, and
while he did not "butcher" here to deserve his name, his soldiers left
as ugly a fame behind them as Montrose's men, what time he made bloody
assault on the city.
And in Broad Street may be found the house in which George Gordon, Lord
Byron, lived in his school days. In Don Juan, he autobiographically
remembers--
"As 'Auld Lang Syne' brings Scotland one and all,
Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills, and clear streams
The Dee, the Don, Balgownie's Brig's black wall,
All my boy feelings, all my gentle dreams
Of what I then dreamt, clothed in their own pall
Like Banquo's offspring;--floating past me seems
My childhood in this childishness of mine:
I care not--'tis a glimpse of 'Auld Lang Syne.'"
Aberdeen is a sea city, lying between the mouths of the Dee and the Don.
A bridge, dating from 1320, crosses the Don, and Byron steadfastly
avoided it, lest he, a single son, might be found thereon on the single
foal of a mare, and the prophecy be filled, the brig fall down.
One day in a small booth off Union Street I stopped to buy
strawberries--if you pick up southern England in early May and make
Inverness in late August, you can follow red strawberries and red
poppies in the wheat all the way from Land's End to John o' Groat's.
I asked the price of the berries and was told. I asked again,
and again. Finally, not ears but intuition told me. It was a
Scandinavian-Gaelic-English. I remembered that in Edinburgh I had
once asked a policeman the way, and hearing his reply I turned to my
friend--"Wouldn't you think you were in Minneapolis?" For especially
in Aberdeen you are looking to that Norway with which Scotland was so
closely linked, as with all the Scandinavian countries, in the early
centuries, till the Maid of Norway, granddaughter to Alexander III died
on her way to take the crown, and till after Margaret of Denmark brought
the Orkneys and the Hebrides to James III as her dowery.
"To Norroway, to Norroway,
To Norroway o'er the faem;
The King's daughter of Norroway,
'Tis thou maun bring her hame."
And I remember the tragedy of that frustrated journey--
"O forty miles off Aberdeen,
'Tis fifty fathoms deep,
And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi' the Scots lords at his feet."
Remembering the sea, which I had not yet seen, I tried to make my way
down to the shore, but Aberdeen is a sea-port, and docks instead of
shore line its sea edge. What I was seeking was rather rocks--
"On the rocks by Aberdeen,
Where the whistlin' wave had been
As I wandered and at e'en
Was eerie--"
And after a visit to the fishmarket, which is a truly marvelous
monstrous place, I set out to find the rocks, toward the south.
There is never a place more rock-bound, more broken into fantastic
shapes, and worn daily and increasingly by the waves, than this east
coast. Neither Biarritz nor Brittany nor Nova Scotia is more broken or
more thunderous in resentment. I have not seen the Magellan straits.
One is constantly conscious of fish on this east coast. The railroads
form the Great East Fish route. I have been coming up in the night from
London and had to hold my breath until we passed these swift fish trains
which have the right of way to the metropolitan market. A little south
of Aberdeen is the village of Findon; whence finnan haddie.
_Dunnottar_
The rocks which were my goal were those just below Stonehaven. At
Stonehaven the French had landed supplies for the Forty Five--as from
Montrose, a few miles farther down the coast, King James had sailed
after the failure of the Fifteen. Fishing vessels lay idly in the narrow
harbour, their tall masts no doubt come "frae Norroway o'er the faem,"
since the trees on the east coast have not increased from that day when
Dr. Johnson found the sight of a tree here equal to that of a horse in
Venice.
Dunnottar stands on a great crag of this coast, against which the sea
has beaten angrily since time and the coast began, against which it
moans and whines at low tide, and then, come high tide, rushes
thunderously in to see what havoc it can work once more.
[Illustration: DUNNOTTAR CASTLE.]
Dunnottar is impregnable. I cannot believe that sixteen inch guns--is it
seventeen, now?--would make impression on this great red crag. I know
they would; after Liege and Namur one knows that modern guns can outlaw
any impregnability of the past. But I do not believe.
The road from Stonehaven runs for two miles over level country, and
then, suddenly, the edge breaks in a sheer cliff.
Across a natural moat of great depth, on a cliff crag, stands the
castle. The road picks its way down perilously; only a mule path, and
that precipitous. Then it crosses the dry bed where once may have hung a
draw bridge, and, entering through a portcullis, it climbs to the
castle, through a winding, tortuous way, sometimes a climb, sometimes a
flight of steps, sometimes open to the sky but ramped sternly on either
side, sometimes through stone canyons; a place impossible to surprise.
Finally you reach the top, the sky.
The top is three acres large.
Far back, no doubt in Culdee times, a church stood there. Because
churches must be sanctuary they took the high places; otherwise why
should one lift prayer to God when the mad sea was continually
contradicting the faith?
Sir William Keith, being a warrior with a warrior's eye, looked on the
place, found it strategically good, and built a tower thereon. He was
excommunicated by the Bishop of St. Andrew's--who did not anticipate the
Lords of the Congregation and the Covenanters. Sir William appealed to
Rome. Rome ordered the ban removed. And ordered Sir William to build a
church on the mainland, beyond the protestantism of the waves.
It began its war history early. In 1297 four thousand English took
refuge here to escape Wallace. Nothing daunted, Wallace scaled the
cliff, entered a window--the proof is there in the window--opened the
gate, let in his men, and slaughtered the four thousand.
Edward III took it, and Montrose besieged it.
Then it swung back into loyal legal possession, and experienced a bit of
history worth the telling. In 1652--Montrose had been dead two
years--the Countess Dowager had taken into safe keeping the regalia of
Scotland. The castle was besieged by those who had killed their king and
would destroy the king's insignia. If the castle should fall the very
symbol of the king's royalty would be melted, as Cromwell melted the
regalia of England. The defense was not strong. At any moment it might
be forced to surrender. But the regalia must be saved.
So the Lady Keith plotted. It was a woman's plot--always there is the
woman in Jacobitism. The wife of the minister at Kinneff paid a visit to
the wife of the governor of Dunnottar; Mrs. Grainger called on Mrs.
Ogilvie. She had been "shopping" in Stonehaven, and was returning to
Kinneff five miles down the sea. When Mrs. Grainger left the castle she
carried with her the crown of Scotland. Sitting on her horse she made
her way through the besieging lines, and her maid followed with the
scepter of Scotland and the sword in a bag on her back. The English
besiegers showed every courtesy to the harmless woman--and to the
Honours of Scotland. Mrs. Grainger carefully buried the treasure beneath
the paving of Kinneff church, and not until her death did she betray
their hiding place to her husband.
Meanwhile Lady Keith sent her son Sir John to France. A little boat
escaping in the night carried him to the French vessel lying off shore,
and the Lady sent forth the rumour that Sir John had carried the regalia
to the King o'er the water, to Charles II at Paris. It was after the
Restoration that the aureate earth at Kinneff was dug up. The women had
saved the Scottish crown for the rightful lawful king.
A dark chapter runs a quarter of a century later. The castle was still
loyal. In truth it was always loyal except in brief usurpations, as all
this corner of Scotland was loyal and royal and Jacobite. In 1675 in
"Whig's Vault" there lodged one hundred and sixty-seven Covenanters as
prisoners, and they lodged badly. Many died, a few escaped, the rest
were sold as slaves. Coming on ship to New Jersey as the property of
Scott of Pitlochry, Scott and his wife died and almost all the
covenanting slaves. Only a few saw the plantations of the New World, and
could resume the worship of their God. The story of Dunnottar is dark.
The castle looks the dark part it played.
In Dunnottar churchyard on the mainland there is a Covenanter's stone,
where "Old Mortality" was working when Scott came upon him. The stone
carries a simple stern legend of heroism--and almost wins one to the
cause.
And yet, there is evidence that in stern Dunnottar life had its moments
other than war and siege. The remnants of the castle are of great
extent; bowling gallery, ballroom, state dining-room, a library, a large
chapel, speak a varied existence. There is a watch tower, a keep,
rising forty sheer feet above the high rock, with ascent by a winding
stair, somewhat perilous after the centuries; but from the Watchman's
seat what a prospect, landward and seaward! What a sense of security in
the midst of peril! And on the farther corner of the giddy height, above
the rock and above the waves dashing far below, I found growing blue
bells of Scotland.
There is one corner of the castle where I fain would inhabit, the
northwest corner that looks down on the sea raging cruelly upon the
rocks that are the first line of defense against the onslaught of the
sea, and that looks far over the North Sea; that sea which is more
mysterious to me and more lovely than the Mediterranean; I have seen it
a beautiful intense Italian blue, with an Italian sky above it. I have
never seen it still, always surging, raging, always cruel. Yet I should
be willing to look out on it for many unbroken days. And to hear the
somber movement of the "Keltic" sonata played upon the rocks.
The Earl Marischal liked the view, whatever his generation. The North
was in his blood, and the sea, even though he was a landsman, spoke
adventure. The Earl's bedroom is almost habitable to-day. Once it was a
place of luxury. The plaster still clings to the walls in places, and
there is a fireplace where still one could light a fire against the
chill of the North. The date above is 1645, when Charles was still king,
and there was no threat of disloyalty. The tablet unites the arms of the
Keiths and the Seatons, the stone divided by a pillar surmounted by two
hearts joined. The Keith motto, _Veritas vincit_, underlines the Keith
shield; but I like better the Seaton motto--_Hazard yit forvard_.
The Earl's library opens out of this. And I doubt not it was richly
stored in the days when the last Lord Marischal won here that mental
habitude which made him equal in wit and wisdom to Voltaire. And no
doubt here sat his mother, loyal Jacobite, steadfast Catholic, sending
her two sons forth to battle for the lost cause of the Stewarts--never
lost while women remember--while she looked forth on these waters and
watched for the return. The story runs in the Jacobite ballad of "Lady
Keith's Lament"--
"I may sit in my wee croo house,
At the rock and the reel fu' dreary,
I may think on the day that is gane,
And sigh and sab till I grow weary....
"My father was a good lord's son,
My mother was an earl's daughter,
An' I'll be Lady Keith again,
That day our king comes o'er the water."