wars in France, where
he looked for renown and fortune.

For these were, as may have been gathered, those evil days when James I.
of Scotland was still a captive to England, and when the House of Albany
exercised its cruel misrule upon Scotland; delaying to ransom the King,
lest they should bring home a master.

Old Robert of Albany had been King Stork, his son Murdoch was King Log;
and the misery was infinitely increased by the violence and lawlessness
of Murdoch's sons. King Robert II. had left Scotland the fearful legacy
of, as Froissart says, 'eleven sons who loved arms.' Of these, Robert
III. was the eldest, the Duke of Albany the second. These were both
dead, and were represented, the one by the captive young King James, the
other by the Regent, Duke Murdoch of Albany, and his brother John, Earl
of Buchan, now about to head a Scottish force, among whom Patrick
Drummond intended to sail, to assist the French.

Others of the eleven, Earls of Athol, Menteith, &c., survived; but the
youngest of the brotherhood, by name Malcolm, who had married the heiress
of Glenuskie, had been killed at Homildon Hill, when he had solemnly
charged his Stewart nephews and brothers to leave his two orphan children
to the sole charge of their mother's cousin, Sir David Drummond, a good
old man, who had been the best supporter and confidant of poor Robert
III. in his unhappy reign, and in embassies to France had lost much of
the rugged barbarism to which Scotland had retrograded during the wars
with England.

CHAPTER II: THE RESCUE OF COLDINGHAM

It was a lonely tract of road, marked only by the bare space trodden by
feet of man and horse, and yet, in truth, the highway between Berwick and
Edinburgh, which descended from a heathery moorland into a somewhat
spacious valley, with copsewood clothing one side, in the midst of which
rose a high mound or knoll, probably once the site of a camp, for it
still bore lines of circumvallation, although it was entirely deserted,
except by the wandering shepherds of the neighbourhood, or occasionally
by outlaws, who found an admirable ambush in the rear.

The spring had hung the hazels with tassels, bedecked the willows with
golden downy tufts, and opened the primroses and celandines beneath them,
when the solitary dale was disturbed by the hasty clatter of horses'
feet, and hard, heavy breathing as of those who had galloped headlong
beyond their strength. Here, however, the foremost