advices from one so honoured as the Tutor of Glenuskie; and, on their
sides, Malcolm and Sir David resolved to do their best to have some gold
pieces to contribute, rather than so 'proper a knight' should fail in
raising his ransom; but gold was never plenty, and Patrick needed all
that his uncle could supply, to bear him to those wars in France, where
he looked for renown and fortune.

For these were, as may have been gathered, those evil days when James I.
of Scotland was still a captive to England, and when the House of Albany
exercised its cruel misrule upon Scotland; delaying to ransom the King,
lest they should bring home a master.

Old Robert of Albany had been King Stork, his son Murdoch was King Log;
and the misery was infinitely increased by the violence and lawlessness
of Murdoch's sons. King Robert II. had left Scotland the fearful legacy
of, as Froissart says, 'eleven sons who loved arms.' Of these, Robert
III. was the eldest, the Duke of Albany the second. These were both
dead, and were represented, the one by the captive young King James, the
other by the Regent, Duke Murdoch of Albany, and his brother John, Earl
of Buchan, now about to head a Scottish force, among whom Patrick
Drummond intended to sail, to assist the French.

Others of the eleven, Earls of Athol, Menteith, &c., survived; but the
youngest of the brotherhood, by name Malcolm, who had married the heiress
of Glenuskie, had been killed at Homildon Hill, when he had solemnly
charged his Stewart nephews and brothers to leave his two orphan children
to the sole charge of their mother's cousin, Sir David Drummond, a good
old man, who had been the best supporter and confidant of poor Robert
III. in his unhappy reign, and in embassies to France had lost much of
the rugged barbarism to which Scotland had retrograded during the wars