“The Abbot has just arrived; many thanks; as also for the Monastery—when you send it!!!
“The Abbot will have a more than ordinary interest for me, for an ancestor of mine by the mother’s side, Sir J. Gordon of Gight, the handsomest of his day, died on a scaffold at Aberdeen for his loyalty to Mary, of whom he was an imputed paramour as well as her relation. His fate was much commented on in the Chronicles of the times. If I mistake not, he had something to do with her escape from Loch Leven, or with her captivity there. But this you will know better than I.
“I recollect Loch Leven as it were but yesterday. I saw it in my way to England in 1798, being then ten years of age. My mother, who was as haughty as Lucifer with her descent from the Stuarts, and her right line from the old Gordons, not the Seyton Gordons, as she disdainfully termed the ducal branch, told me the story, always reminding me how superior her Gordons were to the southern Byrons,—notwithstanding our Norman, and always masculine descent, which has never lapsed into a female, as my mother’s Gordons had done in her own person.
“I have written to you so often lately that the brevity of this will be welcome.
