monarch, "I want to drink this myself.
I'll give you a toast. May there never come a time when a Scotchman is
afraid to risk his head for what he thinks is right."

And this toast they drank together.

THE KING DINES

"When kings frown, courtiers tremble," said Sir Donald Sinclair to the
Archbishop of St. Andrews, "but in Stirling the case seems reversed.
The courtiers frown, and the king looks anxiously towards them."

"Indeed," replied the prelate, "that may well be. When a man invites a
company to dine with him, and then makes the discovery that his larder
is empty, there is cause for anxiety, be he king or churl. In truth my
wame's beginning to think my throat's cut." And the learned churchman
sympathetically smoothed down that portion of his person first named,
whose rounded contour gave evidence that its owner was accustomed to
ample rations regularly served.

"Ah well," continued Sir Donald, "his youthful majesty's foot is
hardly in the stirrup yet, and I'm much mistaken in the glint of his
eye and the tint of his beard, if once he is firmly in the saddle the
horse will not feel the prick of the spur, should it try any tricks
with him."

"Scotland would be none the worse of a firm king," admitted the
archbishop, glancing furtively at the person they were discussing,
"but James has been so long under the control of others that it will
need some force of character to establish a will of his own. I doubt
he is but a nought posing as a nine," concluded his reverence in a
lower tone of voice.

"I know little of mathematics," said Sir Donald, "but yet enough to
tell me that a nought needs merely a flourish to become a nine, and
those nines among us who think him a nought, may become noughts should
he prove a nine. There's a problem in figures for you, archbishop,
with a warning at the end of it, like the flourish at the tail of the
nine."

The young man to whom they referred, James, the fifth of that name,
had been pacing the floor a little distance from the large group of
hungry men who were awaiting their dinner with some impatience. Now
and then the king paused in his perambulation, and gazed out of a
window overlooking the courtyard, again resuming his disturbed march
when his brief scrutiny was completed. The members of the group talked
in whispers, one with another, none too well pleased at being kept
waiting for so important a function as a meal.

Suddenly there was a clatter of horse's hoofs