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Cauldkail Castle, in Aberdeenshire, was the family residence; but few of the eleven young Scotts were ever to be found there after arriving at that age at which they had been able to fly from the paternal hall. It is a terrible task, that of having to provide for eleven sons.
The person who was now to be the great lady of Longueval was named Madame Scott. M. de Larnac had some further particulars to add. He had heard that the Scotts were great upstarts, and that the new owner of the castle had actually been a beggar in New York. A great lawsuit had resulted in favour of her and her husband, making them the owners of a silver-mine.
Charles I., in his instructions to the President of the Court of Session, enjoins "that you take special notice of the children of John Naesmyth, so often recommended by our late dear father and us." Two of Sir Michael's other sons were killed at Edinburgh in 1588, in a deadly feud between the Scotts and the Naesmyths.
The Thirlwalls, the Ridleys, the Howards of Naworth, the wild men of Bewcastle; the Armstrongs, Elliots, Scotts, and others across the Border, they were all of them they and their forebears to the earliest times of the stuff that prefers action, however stormy, to inglorious peace and quiet, and the man who "kept up his end" in their neighbourhood could be no weakling.
Moreover, I had already made up a list of the names of city friends to whom I intended to send handsome specimens of these first fruits of my experiments in farming; the Reillys, the Lynches, the Chapins, the Maxwells, the Scotts, the Fayes, the Deweys, the Morrises, the Millards, the Larneds, the Fletchers, the Ways these and other fortunate cronies were to be made recipients of my bounty in case the fruit held out.
The Scotts' buildings had been burned by the Indians and their boats destroyed save one large canoe which had happened to be on the south shore of the river out of their reach. In this Jack and Solomon and "Mis' Scott" and the Little Cricket set out with loaded packs in the moon of the new leaf, to use a phrase of the Mohawks, for the city of the Great River.
I said the love of the Maxwell Stuarts, Maxwell Scotts, Wolfe Murrays and Sir Thomas now Lord Carmichael was quite enough for me and that if she liked she could twist Sir Graham Montgomery round her little finger; as a matter of fact, neither Sir Graham nor his sons disliked us.
His father, Walter Scott, a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, was a handsome, hospitable, shrewd and religious man, who married, in 1758, Anne, eldest daughter of Dr. John Rutherford, professor of medicine in Edinburgh University. The Scotts had twelve children, of whom only five survived early youth.
Riall's militia and Indians attacked the American light troops vigorously, but they were unable to cope with Kentucky riflemen, sheltered behind trees. Death came with every rifle flash, and the militia and Indians must have given way, had not the light companies of the Royal Scotts and 100th regiments come to their relief. Now came the main and, on the part of Riall, ill-judged attack.
The room was very dark, the Venetian shutters being closed and blinds drawn down to keep out the glare and heat of the day, but the flicker of a white dress on the verandah showed where the two ladies were to be found. Mrs. Bellairs stepped out, and was greeted by a cry of delight from Lucia. "Oh, you are good! Is Bella here?" "Bella is gone to the Scotts', but Mr. Percy is with me."
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