owrie.

Sprot said that he, too, was uneasy, for, if anything came out, he
himself was in evil case. Logan visited France, as well as London, at
this time; he returned home in the spring of 1606, but Bower expressed
the belief that he would go on to Spain, 'to meet Bothwell and Father
Andrew Clerk, and if he come home it will be rather to die in his own
country than for any pleasure he has to live.' Bothwell and Father
Andrew, of course, were both Catholic intriguers, among whom Bothwell
reckoned Logan and Gowrie.

Now the letter to Bower here attributed to Logan, telling of the new
'knell at his heart' when he is rebuked and insulted as he plays the
merry companion in London, and near the Court; his touching complaint of
the falseness of the world (he himself being certainly the blackest of
traitors), with the distress of Bower, do make up a very natural
description. The ghost of his guilt haunts Logan, he cannot drown it in
a red sea of burgundy: life has lost its flavour; if he returns, it will
be with the true Scottish desire to die in his own country, though of his
ancient family's lands he has not kept an acre. Pleasant rich Restalrig,
strong Fastcastle, jolly Gunnisgreen of the 'great Yules,' all are gone.
Nothing is left.

Surely, if Sprot invented all this, he was a novelist born out of due
time. Either he told truth, or, in fiction, he rivalled De Foe.

Matthew Logan, being called, contradicted Sprot, as we have already said.
He himself had seen Bower when he brought him Logan's letter from London,
take his son, Valentine, apart, and knew that Valentine read a letter to
him. 'It was a meikle letter,' Matthew said, and, if Sprot tell truth,
it contained three enclosures. Bower may have stopped his son from
reading the melancholy and compromising epistle, and kept it to be read
by Sprot. Logan's folly in writing at all was the madness that has
ruined so many men and women.

Matthew could not remember having ridden to Edinburgh with Logan in July
1600, just before the Gowrie affair, as Sprot had declared that he did.
We could scarcely expect him to remember that. He could remember nothing
at all that was compromising, nothing of Logan's rash speeches. As to
the Yule feast at Gunnisgreen, he averred that Lady Restalrig only said,
'The Devil delight in such a feast that makes discord, and makes the
house ado'--that is, gives trouble. Asked if wine and beer were stored
in Fastcastle, in 1600, he said