Thus encouraged, Tom Checkstone related to the Princess a very plausible and interesting story, the main points of which he did not forget to communicate by letter to his friend in London. He assured the Princess that poverty alone prevented the king from taking action; that His Majesty chafed grievously in his enforced seclusion; and that the legitimate sovereign of Great Britain, in spite of the plebeian origin of his mother, was in all respects a worthy descendant of the Jameses. ‘Then His Majesty must come hither,’ said the Princess. ‘But I am greatly in doubt whether I can place implicit confidence in Mr M‘Dum. He is an excellent servant, but I fear he is not too loyal; and we must risk nothing.’ ‘Mr M‘Dum,’ said Tom, ‘has very well taken care of himself hitherto. Your Royal Highness is perhaps not aware that he accepted a bribe from me when I applied for my present position in your Royal Highness’s household. I have his receipt for eight hundred pounds.’ ‘Then, we shall certainly dismiss him,’ remarked the Princess with signs of rising anger. ‘But, as I say, he is withal an excellent servant, and it would not become us to act towards him in anger. I will pension him; and when he has left the castle, we may receive the king without any risk; for all my other servants have from their childhood been devoted to the royal cause.’ The result of this conversation—all the details of which were faithfully reported to Charlie Stuart—was that Mr M‘Dum, after a somewhat stormy scene with the Princess, quitted Balquhalloch, with an eye to an eligible public-house in Glasgow; and on the day of his departure, the Princess wrote a loyal and affectionate letter to her nephew, and despatched it to him by the hands of her chaplain, the Rev. Octavius M‘Fillan, a priest who, although he possessed no remarkable degree of intelligence, was of unimpeachable devotion to the Princess, and of great simplicity and kindness of heart. ‘Our castle,’ the letter concluded, ‘is held at your Majesty’s disposal; and all within it is at your Royal service.’ Father M‘Fillan, with much ceremony, delivered the missive to Charlie at his chambers in the Inner Temple; and ‘the king’ was pleased to say in reply that he would at his earliest convenience visit his well-beloved aunt in the north. Two or three days afterwards, the second column of the _Times_ contained an announcement to the effect that Catharine Smith, daughter of the late John Smith of Manchester, intended thenceforth to assume the surname of Plantagenet, and upon all future occasions to style herself, and be known as, Catharine Plantagenet. Fortunately, the _Times_ was not studied at Balquhalloch, the Princess reading only the _Edinburgh Courant_, because it was a thorough-going Tory journal, and the London _Morning Post_, because it was of eminently aristocratic tone. A week later, Charlie, who had meantime received some long letters from Tom, went down to Scotland. INDIAN JUGGLERS.