Let me show by an imaginary case how hard it may be to catch the chameleon tints of Highland blood. There is a youth much at home in Perthshire, as carrying on there, and elsewhere, the highest form of sport, at which he seldom misses his aim, yet often puts his victims to a great deal of needless pain. He was well known to Robertson of Struan, and quite as familiar in the Georges’ Court. He appears not to have worn the kilt, nor yet breeches, but he has as much right to a tartan and a pibroch as many Highland clans once strangers here. Now if he had settled down and founded a family in Atholl, it might have come to be known as MacEros, or Vich Venus, or FitzZeus, if he chose to hark back to the fame of his grandfather. His own birth, in strict Scottish law, should have been registered under the presumed name of MacVulcan; but Struan Robertson could tell us how there were family scandals tending to fix on him that of MacMars or MacMercury, which could be translated as FitzAres or FitzHermes; then one episode in his career might have obfuscated his descendants as MacPsyches, which, on coming to try their fortune in London, they would be well advised to translate into Cupidson; or as the Earl of Bute’s butler transposed MacCall into Almack, they might find it convenient to be known as Lovemakers, unless they took a fancy for Lovell as a name found in Perthshire, and said to be of gipsy origin. But then they never could be sure that one or other of their forbears had not found good reason for altogether changing his name, perhaps having been out in the ’45, where Cupid intrigued on both sides, if we may trust Captain Waverley’s experiences. Should the reader sniff at this flight of mine, let him know how it is all taken on a single feather stolen from Sir Walter’s wing, who in the famous romance that has Atholl for one of its scenes, makes the prejudiced English colonel own that he “could not have endured Venus herself if she had been announced in a drawing-room by the name of Miss MacJupiter.” The history of Olympus, as of Atholl, is a little obscure; but its celestial tartan, too, seems to have been a chequer of jealousies and kisses, feuds and favours, with revolution as the most outstanding stripe in the pattern. And those who suffer under the thunderbolts and vulture beaks of the present, have always looked fondly back to a golden age, when everything went well under the chieftainship of some Saturn whose origin is lost in distance along with any unlovely traits of conduct, such as dethroning his father or swallowing his own children. IV BREADALBANE