instructions should be reduced to writing. His Grace thereupon
angrily seized a playing card from the table where he was engaged in
gambling, and complied with the request. This card happened to be the
nine of diamonds, and to this day is known as "the curse of Scotland." A
long period elapsed before those who had sympathized with the Young
Pretender's cause were restored to the good graces of the English
throne, and it was Scotland that was compelled to bear the brunt of the
royal displeasure. The sins of the fathers were visited upon their
children, and it is not at all unlikely that the sympathies of Alexander
Campbell's son, Malcolm (my grandfather), for the last of the House of
Stuart developed a chain of circumstances that resulted, with other
causes, in his embarkation for America.
During the early period of my childhood I became familiar with the
Jacobite songs which my father used to sing, and which had been handed
down in the Campbell family. I was so deeply imbued during my early life
with the Jacobite spirit of my forefathers that when I read the account
in my English history of George I, carrying with him his little
dissolute Hanoverian Court and crossing the water to England to become
King of Great Britain, I felt even at that late day that the act was a
personal grievance. Through the passage of many years a fragment of one
of these Jacobite songs still rings in my ears:
"There's nae luck aboot the hoose,
There's nae luck ava [at all];
There's little pleasure in the hoose
When our gude man's awa."
Even now some of those songs appeal to me possibly in the same manner as
the "Marseillaise" to the French, or the "Ranz de Vaches" to the Swiss
who have wandered from their mountain homes, or as the strains of our
national hymn affect my own fellow countrymen in foreign lands, whose
hearts are made to throb when with uncovered heads they listen, and are
carried back in memory to the days of "auld lang syne."
My grandfather, Malcolm Campbell, received the degree of Master of Arts
from the University of St. Andrews, the great school of Scottish
Latinity, and his diploma conferring upon him that honor is still in the
possession of his descendants. Before leaving Scotland he had formed an
intimacy with Andrew Picken, and during the voyage to America enjoyed
the pleasing companionship of that gentleman together with his wife and
their two children. Mrs. Picken was the only daughter of S
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