_From Captain Dugald Dalgetty_, _of Drumthwacket_, _to the Most Noble and Puissant Prince James_, _Earl of Montrose_, _commanding the musters of the King in Scotland_. _These_— MY LORD,—As touching the bruit, or _fama_, as we said at the Mareschal College, I shall forthwith answer, and that _peremptorie_. For this story of the _duello_, as a man may say (though, indeed, they that fought in it were not in the dual number, as your Grecian hath it, but eight soldados—seven of them gallant men), truly the story is of the longest; but as your lordship will have it, though more expert with the sword than the goosequill, I must even buckle to. Let your lordship conceive of your poor officer, once lieutenant and Rittmaster under that invincible monarch, the bulwark of the Protestant faith, Gustavus the Victorious; conceive, I say, Dugald Dalgetty, of Drumthwacket that should be, in Paris, concerned with a matter of weight and moment not necessary to be mooted or minted of. As I am sitting at my tavern ordinary, for I consider that an experienced cavalier should ever lay in provenant as occasion serveth, comes in to me a stipendiary of my Lord Winter, bidding me know that his master would speak to me: and that not _coram populo_, as I doubt not your lordship said at St. Leonard’s College in St. Andrews, but privily. Thereon I rise and wait on him; to be brief—_brevis esse laboro_, as we said lang syne—his lordship would have me to be of his backers in private rencontre with four gentlemen of the King’s Musketeers. Concerning the cause of this duello, I may well say _teterrima causa_. His lordship’s own sister Milady Clarik was in question; she being, I fear me, rather akin in her way of life to Jean Drocheils (whom your lordship may remember; for, the Baillies expulsing her from Aberdeen, she migrated to St. Andrews, _ad eundem_, as the saying is) than like, in her walk and conduct, to a virtuous lady of a noble family. She was, indeed, as current rumour had it, the light o’love or _belle amie_ of Monsieur d’Artagnan, his lordship’s adversary.