e. "Do you doubt my
word?"

"I do not doubt it in the least," answered MacIan.

"Then, why," said the large man in the silk hat, trembling from head to
foot, "why do you wear your hat before the king?"

"Why should I take it off," retorted MacIan, with equal heat, "before a
usurper?"

Turnbull swung round on his heel. "Well, really," he said, "I thought at
least you were a loyal subject."

"I am the only loyal subject," answered the Gael. "For nearly thirty
years I have walked these islands and have not found another."

"You are always hard to follow," remarked Turnbull, genially, "and
sometimes so much so as to be hardly worth following."

"I alone am loyal," insisted MacIan; "for I alone am in rebellion. I am
ready at any instant to restore the Stuarts. I am ready at any instant
to defy the Hanoverian brood--and I defy it now even when face to face
with the actual ruler of the enormous British Empire!"

And folding his arms and throwing back his lean, hawklike face,
he haughtily confronted the man with the formal frock-coat and the
eccentric elbow.

"What right had you stunted German squires," he cried, "to interfere in
a quarrel between Scotch and English and Irish gentlemen? Who made you,
whose fathers could not splutter English while they walked in Whitehall,
who made you the judge between the republic of Sidney and the monarchy
of Montrose? What had your sires to do with England that they should
have the foul offering of the blood of Derwentwater and the heart of
Jimmy Dawson? Where are the corpses of Culloden? Where is the blood
of Lochiel?" MacIan advanced upon his opponent with a bony and pointed
finger, as if indicating the exact pocket in which the blood of that
Cameron was probably kept; and Edward VII fell back a few paces in
considerable confusion.

"What good have you ever done to us?" he continued in harsher and
harsher accents, forcing the other back towards the flower-beds. "What
good have you ever done, you race of German sausages? Yards of barbarian
etiquette, to throttle the freedom of aristocracy! Gas of northern
metaphysics to blow up Broad Church bishops like balloons. Bad pictures
and bad manners and pantheism and the Albert Memorial. Go back to
Hanover, you humbug? Go to----"

Before the end of this tirade the arrogance of the monarch had entirely
given way; he had fairly turned tail and was trundling away down the
path. MacIan strode after him still preaching and flourishing his