ral Patrick Gordon, of
Auchleuchries, Aberdeenshire (1635-1690), who, having spent thirty-nine
years of faithful service to Peter the Great, died and was buried at
Moscow. Or one might cite John Gordon, of Lord Byron's Gight family, who,
having helped to assassinate Wallenstein in the town of Eger, in 1634,
turned himself into a Dutch Jonkheer, dying at Dantzig, and being buried
at Delft.

Sometimes, especially in the case of merchants, the venturers settled
down permanently in their new fatherland, as in the case of the Gordons
of Coldwells, Aberdeenshire, who are now represented solely by the family
of von Gordon-Coldwells, in Laskowitz. So rapid was the transformation of
this family that when one of them, Colonel Fabian Gordon, of the Polish
cavalry, turned up in Edinburgh in 1783, in connexion with the sale of
the family heritage, he knew so little English that he had to be
initiated a Freemason in Latin. To this day there is a family in Warsaw
which, ignoring our principle of primogeniture, calls itself the
Marquises de Huntly-Gordon.

Occasionally the exiles returned home, either to succeed to the family
heritage, or to rescue it from ruin with the wealth they had acquired
abroad. Thus General Alexander Gordon (1669-1751) of the Russian army,
the biographer of Peter the Great, came home to succeed his father as
laird of Auchintoul, Banffshire, and managed by a legal mistake to hold
it in face of forfeiture for Jacobitism. His line has long since died
out, as soldier stock is apt to do--an ironic symbol of the death-dealing
art. But the descendants of another ardent Jacobite, Robert Gordon, wine
merchant, Bordeaux, who rescued the family estate of Hallhead,
Aberdeenshire, from clamant creditors, still flourish. One of them became
famous in the truest spirit of Gay Gordonism, in the person of Adam
Lindsay Gordon, the beloved laureate of Australia.

The vineyard and Australia bring us to the fourth, and rarest, category,
represented by the writer of this book, namely, the family which has not
only retained its Scots heritage, but also flourishes in the land of its
adoption, for Mr. Rafael Gordon is not only laird of Wardhouse,
Aberdeenshire, but is a Spaniard by birth and education, and a citizen of
Madrid: and this double citizenship has been shared by his uncles Pedro
Carlos Gordon (1806-1857), Rector of Stonyhurst; and General J. M.
Gordon, the writer of this book, who will long be remembered as the
pioneer of