About six miles from the thriving market-town of Huntly, in Aberdeenshire, stands the mansion-house of Frendraught, built on the site and incorporating the ruins of the old castle of that name. In the seventeenth century it was the scene of a strange and inexplicable event—an event which, on the supposition that it was not accidental, might well be regarded as tragic. The lands of Frendraught, towards the beginning of the seventeenth century, were in the possession of James Crichton, a laird or minor baron of the period, sufficiently proud of that designation to slight and reject the title of viscount which his son accepted in his father’s lifetime. His wife was Lady Elizabeth Gordon, a woman of a proud and resolute character, daughter of the Earl of Sutherland, and a ‘near cousin,’ as Spalding expresses it, of the Marquis of Huntly, a connection which should be remembered in the course of the narrative. On the crest of a knoll that overlooks the river Deveron, stood and still stands the Tower of Kinnairdy, another baronial residence of Crichton, at the distance of a few miles from Frendraught. Four miles above Kinnairdy, on the same river, stood Rothiemay, the home of the Gordons of Rothiemay, a sept of that numerous and powerful clan of which the Marquis of Huntly was chief. The lairds of Frendraught and of Rothiemay were thus neighbours, at a period when neighbourhood as surely engendered strife as friction develops heat. It chanced that Gordon of Rothiemay sold a portion of his lands adjoining the Deveron to the laird of Frendraught. At the present day, there is perhaps no river in Scotland which at certain seasons of the year furnishes better sport to the angler for salmon than the Deveron, and its excellence in this respect must equally have characterised it two centuries ago; for the right to the valuable salmon-fishing appertaining to the land which had been sold became the subject of bitter strife between the two lairds. Frendraught appealed to the law; but while the cause was winding its way slowly through the courts, he managed, by persecution and provocation, to hurry Rothiemay into acts of exasperation and illegality, which made it easy to procure a decree of outlawry against him. After this, as a contemporary historian has it, ‘Rothiemay would hearken to no conditions of peace, neither would he follow the advice of his wisest friends.’ He made a raid upon the lands of Crichton, who thereupon obtained from the Privy-council a commission to apprehend him.