Of all the companions of Pickle, the most inseparable was Glengarry. Now, since the appearance of ‘Pickle the Spy,’ the author has been denounced before the Gaelic Society! Amidst ‘applause’ a Celtic gentleman, the news-sheets say, accused me of bringing a charge of an odious nature, _without any proofs_. Of course, if I have no proofs, nobody who thinks so need argue against what I, myself, regard as a chain of irrefragable circumstantial evidence. Nor am I aware that any arguments, beyond clamour, have been advanced, in favour of Glengarry’s innocence, except those which I shall presently examine. But first I must meet the charge of wresting facts to suit my ‘prepossessions.’ I had no prepossessions: how should I? If I knew so much as that there was any young Glengarry, before I read the Pickle letters, it was the limit of my information. These documents were pointed out to me, several years ago, by Sir E. Maunde Thompson, when I was in search of a manuscript to print for the Roxburghe Club. I began to read them, where they are to be found, scattered through five or six volumes of the Pelham Papers, in the British Museum. They are not all in sequence in one volume, nor in chronological order. On a first hasty examination, nothing appeared to indicate their author. I therefore had transcripts made of the Pickle Letters, and, after reading them, arranged them chronologically, being helped, where dates failed, by their allusions to public events: such as the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, the death of Henry Pelham, and so forth. On a first glance at the originals, I had no hope of detecting the spy called Pickle. He might be a servant, secretary, or retainer of any Jacobite family. But indications as to his identity kept occurring, when once the papers were sorted, and the hunting instinct awoke in the reader, the fever of the chase. Pickle was apparently no ‘paltry vidette,’ for he was in close relations with the Prime Minister, Henry Pelham, and, later, with the Duke of Newcastle. Now a lacquey may, as Sir Charles Hanbury Williams’s dispatches show, report to an Ambassador, but a Prime Minister is less easy of access. Next, Pickle was, or had succeeded in persuading Pelham that he was, a person of the first importance in the Highlands. A critic has replied that, of course, a spy would pretend to be important, and, naturally, would be accepted as such. Ministers are scarcely so gullible. They do not accept a casual stranger’s identity without inquiry.