a meal and a night's rest. None but
the hardest heart could have resisted such a pathetic appeal, and Farmer
Lauder and his good wife had hearts as large as their bodies. At last
the waif had fallen among good Samaritans. She was received with open
arms; and instead of being sent away in the morning, was cordially
invited to make her home with them.

The rest of Emilia's strange life-story can be told in few words. After
a few years of peaceful and happy life in the hospitable farmhouse, she
married the farmer's only son, an honest and worthy young fellow who
loved her dearly. She became the mother of many children, who in their
humble life knew nothing of their high-placed cousins, the Dukes and
Earls of another world than theirs.

When, in process of time, her husband died--many of her children had
died young, the rest were far from prosperous--Mrs Lauder retired to
spend her last days in a small cottage at St Ninian's, near Stirling,
where for a time she lived in the utmost poverty. Then, when her life
was almost flickering out in destitution, a few of her great relatives
condescended to acknowledge her existence. The Earls of Galloway and
Dunmore, the Duke of Hamilton, and Mrs Stewart Mackenzie combined to
provide her with an annuity of L100; and, thus secure against want, the
old lady contrived to spin out the thread of her days a few years
longer. Thus died, at the advanced age of eighty-five, eating the bread
of charity, the woman who had in her veins the blood of Scotland's
greatest men and her fairest women.

CHAPTER XVIII

A NOBLE VAGABOND

The circle of the British Peerage has included many "vagabonds," some of
whom have worn coronets in our own day; but it is doubtful whether any
one of them all has had the _wanderlust_ in his veins to the same degree
as Edward Wortley Montagu, whose adventurous life was ignominiously
ended by a partridge-bone more than a century and a quarter ago.

It would have been strange if this blue-blooded "rolling-stone" had been
a normal man, since he had for mother that most wayward and eccentric
woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who dazzled England by her beauty and
brilliant intellect, and amused it by her oddities in the days of the
first two Georges. This grandson of the Duke of Kingston, and
great-grandson of the first Earl of Sandwich was "his mother's
boy"--with much of his mother's physical and mental charms, and more
than her eccentricities, as his story ab