stables were well stocked and well used, and, next to riding, archery and golf were his favourite pastimes. In these his son followed him. His skill at the targets and on the links is one of the few memorials of Montrose's youth that time has spared for us; the grace and dexterity of his horsemanship were famous even in an age and a country where all men and most women rode, and were first learned, as such accomplishments can only be learned, in boyhood, as he cantered on his white pony at his father's side over the fair heritage of his sires. But another of his father's tastes he did not share. The smell of tobacco is said to have been peculiarly disagreeable to him, and sums for tobacco and pipes are frequent in the old Earl's accounts.[1] Montrose was the only son of six children. Their mother was Lady Margaret Ruthven, daughter of the first Earl of Gowrie. It was whispered that, like her brother, she dabbled in magic, and had learned from a witch that her son was destined to be a firebrand to his country. If the report be true--and the Black Art found credence in Scotland long after Lady Margaret's day--she may well have sighed to think that the wild fate which had befallen so many of her family was to be the portion of her son. For the Ruthvens had both done and suffered much evil in their time. Her grandfather, who had died in exile, a fugitive from justice, was that grim lord who had risen from a sick-bed to lead the murderers of Rizzio into their queen's presence. Her father, who had perished on the scaffold, one of the many victims of Arran's intrigues, had been concerned in the violent attempt on the young king's liberty popularly known as the Raid of Ruthven. Her two brothers had perished by the sword before their sovereign's face, a fate which there is too good reason to believe that they had destined for him. Of her own life nothing more is known than that she bore her husband six children and died in 1618 when the youngest was but three years old. Her two eldest daughters, Lilias and Margaret, were married soon after her death: Lilias to Sir John Colquhoun of Luss, a union destined to an abrupt and shameful end by his flight with her sister Katherine, who had been received into the family after her father's death and was then little more than a child; but Margaret, though she did not live long to enjoy it, was more fortunate in her marriage with Archibald, first Lord Napier of Merchiston, a wise and good man who had been particularly recommended by King James to his son as the most judicious and disinterested of all Scottish statesmen. Of the others, Dorothea became the wife of Sir James, afterwards Lord Rollo, and Beatrix, the youngest and apparently her brother's favourite, the wife of the Master of Maderty, one of the first to join Montrose under the standard of their king. Both Margaret and Dorothea died young, the first probably about 1630, the latter in 1638; the deaths of Lilias and Beatrix are unrecorded; of Katherine