pirit, her talents and her beauty were
perpetually leading her--and it might have been her destruction.

One afternoon about six o'clock in the first days of May, 1726, I was
passing along the tangle of streets back of the Quai des Theatines,
when I noticed in the walled garden of the great Hotel Kirkpatrick one
of those cheap, open-air theaters of which the Parisians of the
humbler classes are so fond. The place itself was retired enough, and
only accessible from the maze of back streets of which I spoke. There
was a wide, grassy space in the garden where the theater was set, with
its rude appliances. On one side, quite screening it from the formal
gardens of the hotel, was an ancient lilac hedge, a forest of bloom
and perfume, in those first days of May. There were great clumps of
guelder-roses on each side, and syringas, which had grown to be trees,
and looked like fountains of white blossoms.

It was so very sweet and peaceful--it being quite deserted at the
time--that I stood, looking through the open grille of the huge
gateway, and felt the scent of the lilacs and syringas getting into my
blood, as the earth scents and earth sights will; for we are all the
children of Nature, the mighty mother, whether we be born with only
the tiles between us and the stars, or whether our cradle be the
ground itself, and in our mother's bosom shall we sleep at last; so
that is why the green earth is never strange to us, nor any of its
sweetness unfamiliar.

No one would have thought that this old garden--this rich, wild, fair,
virginal place--was in the heart of Paris. The sun was well in the
west, and the shadows on the velvet grass were long. As I meditated I
began to wonder how such a thing as a cheap theater should be set up
in the grounds of the chatelaine of this splendid hotel--who was the
renowned, the redoubtable and the indomitable Madame Margarita Riano
del Valdozo y Kirkpatrick, Countess of Riano, with many other titles,
but who was commonly called Scotch Peg, or Peggy Kirkpatrick, and was
as well-known in Paris as the statue of Henri Quatre on the Pont
Neuf.

Her history was familiar to all Paris. She was the daughter of a poor
Scotch Jacobite, as proud as Lucifer and all hell besides. She had
married Count Riano, a Spanish nobleman, five times a grandee of
Spain, three times a grandee of Portugal, and God knows what else,
with more money than any or all of the Kirkpatricks had ever seen in
their lives. He was t