nations,
By which to adjust their unhappy relations.
With this object in view, it occurred to Buccleuch
That a great deal of mutual good would accrue
If they settled that he and Lord Scroop's nominee
Should meet once a year, and between them agree
To arbitrate all controversial cases
And grant an award on an equable basis.
A brilliant idea that promised to be a
Corrective, if not a complete panacea--
For it really appears that for several years,
These fines of 'poll'd Angus' and Galloway steers
Did greatly conduce, during seasons of truce,
To abating traditional forms of abuse,
And to giving the roues of Border society
Some little sense of domestic propriety.

So finding himself, so to speak, up a tree,
And unable to think of a neat repartee,
He wisely concluded (as Brian Boru did,
On seeing his 'illigant counthry' denuded
Of cattle and grain that were swept from the plain
By the barbarous hand of the pillaging Dane)
To bandy no words with a dominant foe,
But to wait for a chance of returning the blow,
And then let him have it in more suo."

These extracts make me regret that the leading personalities in the
Parliament of 1886 were not commemorated in the same pleasant, jingling
metre.

CHAPTER VIII

The Foreign Office--The new Private Secretary--A Cabinet
key--Concerning theatricals--Some surnames which have passed into
everyday use--Theatricals at Petrograd--A mock-opera--The family from
Runcorn--An embarrassing predicament--Administering the oath--Secret
Service--Popular errors--Legitimate employment of information--The
Phoenix Park murders--I sanction an arrest--The innocent victim--The
execution of the murderers of Alexander II.--The jarring military
band--Black Magic--Sir Charles Wyke--Some of his experiences--The
seance at the Pantheon--Sir Charles' experiment on myself--The
Alchemists--The Elixir of Life, and the Philosopher's Stone--Lucid
directions for their manufacture--Glamis Castle and its
inhabitants--The tuneful Lyon family--Mr. Gladstone at Glamis--He sings
in the glees--The castle and its treasures--Recollections of Glamis.

Having successfully defeated the Civil Service Examiners, I entered the
Foreign Office in 1876, for the six or eight months' training which all
Attaches had to undergo before being sent abroad. The typewriter had
not then been invented, so everything was copied by h