Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/247

 EUGENE FIELD AND NORTHERN LORE

While in London Eugene Field was always talking about the Orkney Islands, the dreariest, foggiest, most uninteresting patches of land in the wet you want to see. He had discovered somehow that Queen Mary of Scots had created that brute Bothwell, duke of Orkney, a title reserved for members of the reigning family. Hence her bestowal of the title helped to emphasize still more the hatred of the nobles against her husband. He chewed the matter over for a month, then one rainy afternoon, at the Cafe Royal, he got it off his chest.

"I want to go to the Orkney Islands to find traces of Bothwell and perhaps get a new angle on that fearless lass—as fearless as she was vindictive—Mary. When the Queen was taken prisoner, Bothwell made for the Orkneys and chose one of the smaller islands to assemble a piratical navy. Instead of stealing queens, he meant to steal goods and chattels of merchantmen passing the Northern Seas and the Channel. He had been a pirate before Mary took him up and was a robber baron by birth. Wonder if his remains rest in the Orkneys or at the bottom of the sea."

"He was buried in some small Danish seaboard town and in a church at that."

"Perhaps he died in the odor of sanctity," laughed Gene; "that would make it only the 243