For days this descendant of Scotland’s proudest nobles tramped aimlessly through the country, sleeping in barns or craving the shelter of the humblest cottage, and, when her money was exhausted, even begging her bread from door to door.

At last human nature reached its limit.  Late one night, footsore and fainting from exhaustion and hunger, she presented herself at a remote farmhouse, and begged piteously for a meal and a night’s rest.  None but the hardest heart could have resisted such a pathetic appeal, and Farmer Lauder and his good wife had hearts as large as their bodies.  At last the waif had fallen among good Samaritans.  She was received with open arms; and instead of being sent away in the morning, was cordially invited to make her home with them.

The rest of Emilia’s strange life-story can be told in few words.  After a few years of peaceful and happy life in the hospitable farmhouse, she married the farmer’s only son, an honest and worthy young fellow who loved her dearly.  She became the mother of many children, who in their humble life knew nothing of their high-placed cousins, the Dukes and Earls of another world than theirs.

When, in process of time, her husband died—­many of her children had died young, the rest were far from prosperous—­Mrs Lauder retired to spend her last days in a small cottage at St Ninian’s, near Stirling, where for a time she lived in the utmost poverty.  Then, when her life was almost flickering out in destitution, a few of her great relatives condescended to acknowledge her existence.  The Earls of Galloway and Dunmore, the Duke of Hamilton, and Mrs Stewart Mackenzie combined to provide her with an annuity of L100; and, thus secure against want, the old lady contrived to spin out the thread of her days a few years longer.  Thus died, at the advanced age of eighty-five, eating the bread of charity, the woman who had in her veins the blood of Scotland’s greatest men and her fairest women.

CHAPTER XVIII

A NOBLE VAGABOND

The circle of the British Peerage has included many “vagabonds,” some of whom have worn coronets in our own day; but it is doubtful whether any one of them all has had the wanderlust in his veins to the same degree as Edward Wortley Montagu, whose adventurous life was ignominiously ended by a partridge-bone more than a century and a quarter ago.

It would have been strange if this blue-blooded “rolling-stone” had been a normal man, since he had for mother that most wayward and eccentric woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who dazzled England by her beauty and brilliant intellect, and amused it by her oddities in the days of the first two Georges.  This grandson of the Duke of Kingston, and great-grandson of the first Earl of Sandwich was “his mother’s boy”—­with much of his mother’s physical and mental charms, and more than her eccentricities, as his story abundantly proves.