Of all the lairdly homes about Crieff, the best known in the world should be Gask, through the several authors whom the Oliphant family has produced. One daughter of this house was Lady Nairne, christened Carolina after the unfortunate prince for whom it had suffered poverty and exile. There was a Charles also, and George III. is said to have been tickled to hear how, every day after dinner, the old laird would turn to his son with “_Charles_, the king’s health!” More than any other writer, by her Jacobite ballads and her _remaniements_ of popular songs, “the White Rose of Gask” has inspired a tender sentiment of the lost cause to thrill so many hearts and piano strings, long after Scottish royalists had transferred their worship to such clay idols as George IV. In my youth, indeed, there were still Perthshire men who spoke more or less heartily of the Hanoverian “usurpers.” I myself was brought up in a touch of the same sentiment, though that my father’s Jacobitism went not very deep appeared from the gusto with which he used to tell the tale of his translating to a lady the inscription on the monument at St. Peter’s dedicated by King George to the “last of the Stuarts,” whereupon a Yankee standing by put in the remark, “I guess George was right smart to say it was the _last_ of them!” Lady Nairne’s hereditary feeling for the Stuarts might not perhaps have endured the test of experience; she was a devout Protestant, and in her old age showed sympathy with the Free Church movement, which is the antipodes of Jacobitism. So modest was she, [Illustration: A WILD SPOT, KILLIN, PERTHSHIRE] that for the greater part of her life, her neighbours, and her own husband, were not aware of her hand in the songs which had crept into wide popularity. It was taken for granted that Burns must be the author of her noblest strain, the “Land o’ the Leal,” better known than understood, as we remember from Mr. Gladstone’s blunder in confusing heaven and Scotland. “The Laird o’ Cockpen,” “Caller Herrin’,” “Will ye no come back again?” are other favourites among her songs, grave and gay; but her most recurrent theme was that glorified memory that, like Queen Mary’s, can wing a sentiment to pierce the joints of Scotland’s logical armour,-- Charlie is my darling, The young Chevalier!