A Noble Life

This is a novel book. Many years ago, how many need not be recorded, there lived in his ancestral castle, in the far north of Scotland, the last Earl of Cairnforth. You will not find his name in Lodge's Peerage, for, as I say, he was the last earl, and with him the title became extinct. It had been borne for centuries by many noble and gallant men, who had lived worthily or died bravely. But I think among what we call heroic lives lives the story of which touches us with something higher than pity, and deeper than love there never was any of his race who left behind a history more truly heroic than he. Now that it is all over and done now that the soul so mysteriously given has gone back unto Him who gave it, and a little green turf in the kirk yard behind Cairnforth Manse covers the poor body in which it dwelt for more than forty years, I feel it might do good to many, and would do harm to none, if I related the story a very simple one, and more like a biography than a tale of Charles Edward Stuart Montgomerie, last Earl of Cairnforth. He did not succeed to the title; he was born Earl of Cairnforth, his father having been drowned in the loch a month before, the wretched countess herself beholding the sight from her castle windows. She lived but to know she had a son and heir to whom she desired might be given his father's name: then she died more glad than sorry to depart, for she had loved her husband all her life, and had only been married to him.