From Captain Dugald Dalgetty, of Drumthwacket, to the Most Noble
and Puissant Prince James, Earl of Montrose, commanding the musters
of the King in Scotland. These -
My Lord,--As touching the bruit, or fama, as we said at the
Mareschal College, I shall forthwith answer, and that peremptorie.
For this story of the duello, as a man may say (though, indeed,
they that fought in it were not in the dual number, as your Grecian
hath it, but eight soldados--seven of them gallant men), truly the
story is of the longest; but as your lordship will have it, though
more expert with the sword than the goosequill, I must even buckle
to.
Let your lordship conceive of your poor officer, once lieutenant
and Rittmaster under that invincible monarch, the bulwark of the
Protestant faith, Gustavus the Victorious; conceive, I say, Dugald
Dalgetty, of Drumthwacket that should be, in Paris, concerned with
a matter of weight and moment not necessary to be mooted or minted
of. As I am sitting at my tavern ordinary, for I consider that an
experienced cavalier should ever lay in provenant as occasion
serveth, comes in to me a stipendiary of my Lord Winter, bidding me
know that his master would speak to me: and that not coram populo,
as I doubt not your lordship said at St. Leonard's College in St.
Andrews, but privily. Thereon I rise and wait on him; to be brief-
-brevis esse laboro, as we said lang syne--his lordship would have
me to be of his backers in private rencontre with four gentlemen of
the King's Musketeers.
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