re grey. His grizzled hair exhibited
marks of having been red, and his complexion was weather-beaten, and
remarkably freckled. Some civilities in French passed between the old man
and my friend, in the course of which they talked of the streets and
squares of Paris, till at length the old soldier, for such he seemed, and
such he was, said with a sigh, in a sharp Highland accent, "Deil ane o'
them a' is worth the Hie Street of Edinburgh!" On inquiry, this admirer
of Auld Reekie, which he was never to see again, proved to be Allan Breck
Stewart. He lived decently on his little pension, and had, in no
subsequent period of his life, shown anything of the savage mood in which
he is generally believed to have assassinated the enemy and oppressor, as
he supposed him, of his family and clan.

Note F.--The Abbess of Wilton.

The nunnery of Wilton was granted to the Earl of Pembroke upon its
dissolution, by the magisterial authority of Henry VIII., or his son
Edward VI. On the accession of Queen Mary, of Catholic memory, the Earl
found it necessary to reinstate the Abbess and her fair recluses, which
he did with many expressions of his remorse, kneeling humbly to the
vestals, and inducting them into the convent and possessions from which
he had expelled them. With the accession of Elizabeth, the accommodating
Earl again resumed his Protestant faith, and a second time drove the nuns
from their sanctuary. The remonstrances of the Abbess, who reminded him
of his penitent expressions on the former occasion, could wring from him
no other answer than that in the text--"Go spin, you jade!--Go spin!"

Note G.--Mons Meg.

Mons Meg was a large old-fashioned piece of ordnance, a great favourite
with the Scottish common people; she was fabricated at Mons, in Flanders,
in the reign of James IV. or V. of Scotland. This gun figures frequently
in the public accounts of the time, where we find charges for grease, to
grease Meg's mouth withal (to increase, as every schoolboy knows, the
loudness of the report), ribands to deck her carriage, and pipes to play
before her when she was brought from the Castle to accompany the Scottish
army on any distant expedition. After the Union, there was much popular
apprehension that the Regalia of Scotland, and the subordinate Palladium,
Mons Meg, would be carried to England to complete the odious surrender of
national independence. The Regalia, sequestered from the sight of the
public, were gener