fitted up for their accommodation, and this afforded them a grateful shelter for more than a quarter of a century.  Of this same parish of Deer a curious story is told in the local annals, showing how conservative and tenacious of traditions the north of Scotland still was in 1711.  The skirmish to which it relates goes by the quaint title of the “Rabbling of Deer,” and is thus reported:  “Some people of Aberdeen, in conjunction with the presbytry of Deer, to the number of seventy horse or thereby, assembled on the twenty-third of March, 1711, to force in a Presbyterian teacher in opposition to the parish; but the presbytry and their satellites were soundly beat off by the people, not without blood on both sides.”

There was little of the martyr about the Scot of that warlike day, and most emphatically and literally did he show himself a “soldier of the Lord.”

The aisle of the old church of Slains contains the graves of Countess Mary and her husband, with an epitaph in Latin, of which the following is a translation:  “Beneath this tombstone there are buried neither gold nor silver, nor treasures of any kind, but the bodies of the most chaste wedded pair, Mary, countess of Erroll, and Alexander Hay of Dalgaty, who lived peaceably and lovingly in matrimony for twenty-seven years.  They wished to be buried here beside each other, and pray that this stone may not be moved nor their remains disturbed, but that these be allowed to rest in the Lord until He shall call them to the happy resurrection of that life which they expect from the mercy of God and the merits of the Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ.”

The central figure, however, in the history of the Hays of Erroll, and that which no one who bears the name of Hay can think of without a thrill of pride, is the Lord Kilmarnock who fell, in 1746, a victim to the last unsuccessful but heroic rising in favor of the Stuarts.  I have heard it whispered as an instance of “second sight” that some years before he had any reason to anticipate such a death he was once startled by the ghostly opening of a door in the apartment where he was sitting alone, and by the apparition, horribly distinct and realistic, of a bloody head rolling slowly toward him across the room; till it rested at his feet.  The glassy eyes were upturned to his, and the bonny locks were clotted with blood:  it was as if it had just rolled from under the axe of the executioner; and the features, plainly discerned, were his own!

His part in the rising of 1745 belongs to history, but his personal demeanor concerns my narrative more closely.  All the contemporary accounts are loud in praise of his beauty and elegance of person, his refinement of manner, his variety of accomplishments; and Scott, in his Tales of a Grandfather, relates a curious circumstance concerning his fine presence at the moment of his execution.  A lady of fashion who had never seen him before, and who was herself, I believe, the wife of one who had much to do with Lord Kilmarnock’s death-warrant, seeing him pass on his way to the block, formed a most violent attachment for his person, “which in a less serious affair would have, been little less than a ludicrous frenzy.”