Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. I Have already told you that the Scots came from Ireland, and originally from the western part of South Britain. Ireland (or Hibernia, as it was anciently called) was, at a very early period peopled by settlers from British shores, and from their wandering across the channel to find a new home, they were called Sceite, an Irish word for dispersed or scattered, and not long after the inhabitants of Ireland were known by the name of Scots. About the year 503 the Scots made their first settlement in Caledonia in the Mull of Cantire. The chiefs of the new colonists were the three sons of an Irish king, and to Fergus, one of the three, the Scottish people proudly trace their royal pedigree, considering him as the founder of their monarchy. His power atfirst was small, his followers few, and his territory extended no farther than the peninsula wherein he had landed. By degrees all these increased, and though the twenty-nine kings that succeeded him were not famed for any particular exploits or great virtues, yet, at the close of their reigns, the Scots had gained so much power and ascendancy in Caledonia as to aim at overthrowing the Pictish kingdom, in which they at last, as you have heard, succeeded. In 843 Kenneth Mac Alpin, king of the Scots in their own nook of the island,
broke the bounds of his ancient dominions, and, by a decisive battle over the Picts, added that kingdom to his former possessions, and, with the victory, took the title of king of Scotland. From this period, till its union with England in 1603, Scotland was governed by one king.

I am glad we are come to the real reigns of the Scottish kings, said Jane;
I long to hear about the brave Bruce and Sir William Wallace, too.

But before you begin about them, Mamma, said Arthur,
do tel…