akes love to my rural heroine, the lady of
Fernilee, a Kerr. That night Bothwell blows up the Kirk of Field,
Elizabeth and all. Darnley has only one resource. Borrowing the riding
habit of the rural heroine, the lady of Fernilee, he flees across the
Border, and, for the rest of his life, personates Queen Elizabeth. That
is why Elizabeth, who was Darnley, hated Mary so bitterly (on account of
the Kirk of Field affair), and _that is why Queen Elizabeth was never
married_. Side-lights on Shakespeare's Sonnets were obviously cast. The
young man whom Shakespeare admired so, and urged to marry, was--Darnley.
This romance did not get the prize (the anachronism about Shakespeare is
worthy of Scott), but I am conceited enough to think it deserved an
honourable mention.

Enough of my own cigarettes. But there are others of a more fragrant
weed. Who will end for me the novel of which Byron only wrote a chapter;
who, as Bulwer Lytton is dead? A finer opening, one more mysteriously
stirring, you can nowhere read. And the novel in letters, which Scott
began in 1819, who shall finish it, or tell us what he did with his fair
Venetian courtezan, a character so much out of Sir Walter's way? He
tossed it aside--it was but an enchanted cigarette--and gave us "The
Fortunes of Nigel" in its place. I want both. We cannot call up those
who "left half told" these stories. In a happier world we shall listen
to their endings, and all our dreams shall be coherent and concluded.
Meanwhile, without trouble, and expense, and disappointment, and reviews,
we can all smoke our cigarettes of fairyland. Would that many people
were content to smoke them peacefully, and did not rush on pen, paper,
and ink!

CHAPTER XIV: STORIES AND STORY-TELLING
(From STRATH NAVER)

We have had a drought for three weeks. During a whole week this northern
strath has been as sunny as the Riviera is expected to be. The streams
can be crossed dry-shod, kelts are plunging in the pools, but even kelts
will not look at a fly. Now, by way of a pleasant change, an icy north
wind is blowing, with gusts of snow, not snow enough to swell the loch
that feeds the river, but just enough snow (as the tourist said of the
water in the River Styx) "to swear by," or at! _The Field_ announces
that a duke, who rents three rods on a neighbouring river, has not yet
caught one salmon. The acrimoniously democratic mind may take comfort in
that intelligence, but, if the