s the what, I do
confess I know not;--who walking one evening in his garden, saw all at
once a Wing of the Palace, that had been shut up and deserted for Twenty
years, all blazing with Light from the Windows, as for some great
Festival. And his Majesty, half suspecting this might be some
Masquerading prank on the part of the Court Ladies, and half afraid that
there was mischief in it, drew his Sword, and calling upon a brace of
his Gentlemen to follow him, stave in a door and came into a Great Old
Hall, that was the principal apartment in the said Wing. And at the
upper End, where the ancient Throne of his ancestors was long since gone
to Rags and Tatters, and abandoned to Dust and Cobwebs, he saw, sitting
on the chair of Estate, and crowned, a little child that was then but a
boy--the Duke of Sudermania. And lo! as he gazed upon him a Dreadful
Ball, that seemed fashioned in the similitude of his own Head, showed
itself under the Throne, rolled down the steps, and so came on to his
very Feet, where it stopped, splashing his Boots unto the very ankle
with Gore. The tale of the Bloody Boots, as 'tis called, is still quite
familiar to every Nurse in Sweden; but I never heard how it ended, or
whether King Charles had his Head cut off in the Long-run; but every
Swede will swear to the Story; and as for the Boots, I have heard that
they are to be seen, with the dark brown stains of the Blood still upon
'em, in a glass case at the House of one Mr. Herdstroem, who sells Aqua
Vitae over the Milliner's in the Bogbindersgade at Stockholm.

'Twas in the summer of 1747 that I put off my Warder's dress for good
and all, the Rebellion being by this time quite Dead and crushed out;
but before I laid down my halbert 'twas my duty to assist at the
crowning consummation of that disastrous Tragedy. One of the Prime
Traitors in the Scottish Risings had been, it is well known, the
notorious Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, of Castle Downie, in Scotland, then
come to be Eighty years old, and as atrocious an old Villain as ever
lived, but so cunning that he cheated the Gallows for three quarters of
a century, and died like a Gentleman, by the Axe, at last. He had been
mixed up in every plot for the bringing back of King James ever since
the Old Chevalier's Father gave up the Ghost at St. Germain's, yet had
somehow managed to escape scot-free from Attainder and Confiscation.
Even in the '45, when he sent the Clan Fraser to join the Young
Chevalier, he