fault the advice his lady gied him
was bad, and he should no be blamed as sair as he is for the way he
followed it. He was punished, tae, before ever Macduff killed him--
wasna he a victim of insomnia, and is there anything worse for a man
tae suffer frae than that?

Aye, if ever the time comes when I've a chance to play in one of Wull
Shakespeare's dramas, it's Macbeth I shall choose instead of Hamlet.
So I gie you fair warning. But it's only richt to say that the wife
tells me I'm no to think of doing any such daft thing, and that my
managers agree wi' her. So I think maybe I'll have to be content just
to be a music hall singer a' my days--till I succeed in retiring, that
is, and I think that'll be soon, for I've a muckle tae do, what wi
twa-three mair books I've promised myself to write.

Weel, I was saying, a while back, before I digressed again, that soon
after that nicht at Gatti's I moved to London for a bit. It was wiser,
it seemed tae me. Scotland was a lang way frae London, and it was
needfu' for me to be in the city so much that I grew tired of being
awa' sae much frae the wife and my son John. Sae, for quite a spell, I
lived at Tooting. It was comfortable there. It wasna great hoose in
size, but it was well arranged. There was some ground aboot it, and
mair air than one can find, as a rule, in London. I wasna quite sae
cramped for room and space to breathe as if I'd lived in the West End
--in a flat, maybe, like so many of my friends of the stage. But I
always missed the glen, and I was always dreaming of going back to
Scotland, when the time came.

It was then I first began to play the gowf. Ye mind what I told ye o'
my first game, wi' Mackenzie Murdoch? I never got tae be much more o'
a hand than I was then, nae matter hoo much I played the game. I'm a
gude Scot, but I'm thinkin' I didna tak' up gowf early enough in life.
But I liked to play the game while I was living in London. For ane
thing it reminded me of hame; for another, it gie'd me a chance to get
mair exercise than I would ha done otherwise.

In London ye canna walk aboot much. You ha' to gae tae far at a time.
Thanks to the custom of the halls, I was soon obliged to ha' a motor
brougham o' my ain. It was no an extravagance. There's no other way of
reaching four or maybe five halls in a nicht. You've just time to dash
from one hall, when your last encore's given, and reach the next for
your turn. If you depended upon the tube or even on tax