"My niece bade me bring you to her," he said.

"She, poor child, is a happy exile, but she has now and then an exile's longings.

A Scots tongue is pleasant in her ear." So I perforce had to follow him into a fine room with an oaken floor, whereon lay rich Smyrna rugs and the skins of wild beasts from the wood.

There was a prodigious number of soft couches of flowered damask, and little tables inlaid with foreign woods and jeweller's work.

'Twas well enough for your fine gentleman in his buckled shoes and silk stockings to enter such a place, but for myself, in my coarse boots, I seemed like a colt in a flower garden.