I was not the only Scot in Leyden, as I soon discovered; for forbye that I had letters to Master Peter Wishart, who taught philosophy in the college, there abode in the town Sir James Dalrymple, afterwards my Lord Stair, the great lawyer, and sometime a professor in my old college, whose nephew I had so cruelly beaten before I bade farewell to Glasgow. He was a man of a grave deportment, somewhat bent with study, and with the look of exceeding weight on his face which comes to one who has shared the counsel of princes. There were also not a few Scots lords of lesser fame and lesser fortune, pensioners, many of them, on a foreign king, exiles from home for good and evil causes. As one went down the Breedestraat of a morning he could hear much broad Scots spoke on the causeway, and find many fellow-countrymen in a state ill-befitting their rank. For poverty was ever the curse of our nation, and I found it bitter to see ignoble Flemings and Dutch burghers flaunting in their finery, while our poor gentlemen were threadbare. And these folk, too, were the noblest in the land, bearing the proudest names, descendants of warriors and statesmen—Halketts of Pitfirran, Prestons of Gorton, Stewarts, Hays, Sinclairs, Douglases, Hamiltons, and Grahams. It was their fathers and grandfathers who had won the day at Rijnemants, under Sir Robert Stuart, when, says Strada, "Nudi pugnant Scoti multi." They had fought to the death on the Kowenstyn dyke when Parma beleaguered Antwerp. And in all the later wars they took their share—Scotts of Buccleuch, Haigs of Bemersyde, Erskines, Grants, and Kilpatricks. In the Scots brigade in Holland had served John Graham of Claverhouse, as some will have it, the greatest soldier of our age. I saw nothing of him, for while I was in the Low Lands he was already riding in the western hills, shooting and hanging and dealing martial law to herds and weavers. But I saw often the gallant figure of that Colonel Hugh Mackay who met Claverhouse in that last and awful fight in the Highland pass when the mountaineers swept on the lowlanders like a winter storm, and who marched to his death long after on the field of Steinkirk, and fell with the words on his lips, "The will of the Lord be done." This valiant soldier had made the Scots brigade into some semblance of that doughty regiment which Lord Reay commanded under the great Gustavus. He had driven out all the foreign admixture, and, by keeping it to Scotsmen of gentle blood, rendered it well-nigh invincible. But the pay was poor, and they who entered it did so for the sake of honour and for no notions of gain.