I am overmuch English, as is often the case with us who live in the very heart of England. The famous Mr. Johnson is a shire-fellow of mine, and very proud I am of it, and reckon it among the greatest events of my life that he has bullyragged me soundly for differing from him, and being right, about a line of Virgil he had misquoted in my hearing. Like Mr. Johnson, I love men and loathe dancing-masters, and these Scotsmen were men indeed, my Lord Ogilvie, as I came to know later, one of the choicest. He was a spare-built man, in years thirty or thereabouts, with a face all lines and angles, and dotted with pock-marks. For a lord, his purse was very bare of guineas, and nature had made up for it by giving him a belly full of pride. For him, the Highland line had been the boundary of the known world, so that his mind was a chequer-work of curious ignorance and knowledge. From the first I liked him for his joy in his dainty lady. She was the daughter of a cadet of a distant branch of the famous Bobbing John's family, and had spent nearly all her life in France till, on a chance visit to Scotland, she had been snapped up by Ogilvie. They were a strangely matched pair, she from the gay _salons_ of Paris, he from the misty mountains of the north; but mutual love had assorted them to admiration, for the heart of each was sound as a bell. Between bites I answered questions as to how she had looked, what she'd said, done, and so forth. "Was she wearing her brown riding-coat with the pretty wee shoulder capes?" he asked. "No," said I, becoming more interested. "Or her creamy dress with the gold flowers all over it?" "No," said I again, smiling at my discoveries. "She's keeping 'em for London," he explained. "Gosh, man! She will look divine in 'em." "She won't," said I, clipping away at the sweet bits still hanging on the carcass of my chicken. "It'll take your logic all its time to keep six inches o' cauld steel out of your brisket," he said very fiercely. "Never had better chicken in my life," said I, watching him out of one eye--quite enough for any Scotsman. "Damn the chicken!" he roared. "Why won't she?" "Because she's given 'em away," I explained in my airiest tones. "The blue blazes of hell!" gasped his lordship. "Given 'em away, and they cost me twenty pounds English! Given 'em away!" he whined, utterly lost for words, "given 'em away! The callack's clean dawpit. Twenty pounds good English money!" "Nothing like enough!" said I. "You'll be sorry it wasn't two hundred." Two hundred pounds English was, however, something too stupendous for his mind to grasp, and the gibe had no effect on him. While I finished my ale he chuntered away in his own Gaelic. "I'll mak' it up in London," he said at length, "but it'll be the deil's own job." "It will indeed," I agreed, and drained my tankard dry.