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“Eh, mon,” he said, seriously, “they maun be the King’s barstards.”

I laughed from Perth to Stirling Castle, and back again to Edinburgh.

We dined in old castles, lunched with Scottish regiments, saw the old-time splendor of Holyrood at night, with old coaches filled with the beauty of Scottish ladies passing down the High Street where once, in these old wynds and courtyards, the nobility of Scotland lived and quarreled and fought, and where now barefoot bairns and ragged women dwell in paneled rooms in direst poverty. Again and again they sang old Jacobite songs as the King passed, forgetting his Hanoverian ancestry, and one sweet song to Bonnie Charlie—“Will ye no come back again?”—haunts me now, as I write.

With the King, we saw the great shipbuilding works on the Clyde, where thousands of riveters gathered round the King, cheering like demons, and looking rather like demons with their black faces and working overalls. The King was admirable in his manner to all of them, and, though his fatigue must have been great, his good nature enabled him to hide it. His laughter rang out loudest when he passed under the hulk of a ship on the stocks and saw scrawled hugely in chalk upon its plates: “Good old George! We want more Beer!”