Bute probably knew well that this pathetic appeal to the good sense and good feeling of the St. Andrews students would not be made in vain. Between them and himself the feeling had never been otherwise than kindly and cordial, with no trace of the misunderstandings or bitterness which had sometimes clouded his relations with other sections of the university. They respected him as a great Scottish noble: they admired his zeal for, and jealousy of, the honour and reputation of their Alma Mater: they were proud of his position in the world of letters, of his deserved distinction as a munificent and discriminating patron of learning, science, and art. Most of all, they were grateful to him for his continual and unfailing kindness towards themselves--kindness which he had proved not only by the generosity of his public gifts, but by acts of private beneficence of which the outside world knew nothing, and which he himself would have been the last to wish made public. [1] Lord Rosebery's brief tenure of the Premiership (1894-95) had just commenced at the date of this entertainment. He had been Foreign Secretary during the two previous years. [2] The verdict was the unsatisfactory one of "Not Proven"--unsatisfactory, that is, to the public, although doubtless preferable from the prisoner's point of view to one of "Guilty." The present writer, who chanced to hear the concluding part of the case, well remembers the surprise caused, both within and without the court, by the judge's strong summing up in the prisoner's favour. A legal kinsman of the writer told him subsequently what he had never before heard--that a Scottish judge, unlike an English one, considered it his duty not merely to sum up the evidence impartially, but also to direct the jury how to regard it from the point of view of a trained mind. [3] Bute felicitously applies to St. Andrews, seat of the first-called ([Greek: _prôtóklêtos_]) of the Apostles, the word [Greek: _témenos_]--land "cut off" and assigned or dedicated to divine or sacred purposes. Syracuse was of old the [Greek: _témenos_] of Ares (Mars), as the Acropolis at Athens was that of Pallas Athene. [4] Bute himself was a keen curler, thoroughly enjoying a spell at the "roaring game" with his country neighbours. A family tradition records how, night falling before the end of a hotly-contested march on The Moss, above Mountstuart, Bute sent for footmen to bear lighted candles round the rink, so that the game might be concluded that evening.