try to encourage the view that he was a member of that most
bitterly hated race. Nowhere were the Danes more hated or less
successful than in Scotland, yet we are asked to believe that the
founder of one of the most powerful families in that kingdom belonged
to this alien and detested people. The silence itself of the
chronicler sufficiently refutes the idea that the first Gordon was a
renegade or a traitor, as he must have been if he were a Dane.

In all probability the first Gordon, who helped Malcolm Canmore, and
received in return a large grant of lands in Berwick, which became
known as the Gordon country, was one of the many Norman knights
attracted to the Court of Edward the Confessor. Accepting for the
occasion the popular legendary version of Shakespeare, rather than the
corrected account of modern historians, he may be supposed to have
found his way north to the camp of Siward, where the youthful and
exiled Scotch Prince had sought shelter from Macbeth, and it is no
undue stretch of fancy to suggest that he took his part in the
memorable overthrow of that usurper at Dunsinane, and thus obtained
the favour of his successor. The growth of the Gordon family in place
and power was rapid. To the lands on the borders was soon added the
Huntly country on Deeside, where Aboyne Castle now stands, and in a
very short period the Gordons ranked among the most powerful and
warlike clans of Scotland. As Sir Walter Scott wrote of Adam Gordon,
in words which might be appropriately applied to the subject of this
biography:

"'Tis a name which ne'er hath been dishonour'd,
And never will, I trust--most surely never
By such a youth as thou!"

Be its remote origin what it may, no name has appeared more
prominently or more honourably in the British Army Lists during the
last century and a half than that of Gordon. One of the most famous of
our regiments bears and has nobly upheld the name. In honourable and
friendly rivalry with the equally numerous and equally distinguished
clans of Grant and Cameron, the Gordons have figured on every
battlefield from Minden to Candahar, thus establishing at the same
time the political wisdom of Chatham, who first turned the Highlanders
from a cause of danger into a source of strength, and the military
ardour and genius of their own race. Thus it came to pass that the
spirit of remote warlike ages was perpetuated, and that the profession
of arms continued to be the most natural one for an