Part 9 (1/2)

The duke tried to reply, but his utterance was very thick

”No quarter!” he was believed to say

The officer objected and begged that such an order as that should be given in writing The duke rolled over and seized a sheaf of playing-cards Pulling one out, he scrawled the necessary order, and that was taken to the cohlanders could not stand the cannon fire, and the English won Then the fury of the common soldiery broke loose upon the country

There was a reign of fantastic and fiendish brutality One provost of the toas violently kicked for a mild re-house; another was condemned to clean out dirty stables Men and woht suspicion or to extract information cumberland frankly professed his conte whoely punished robberies committed by private soldiers for their own profit

”Mild measures will not do,” he wrote to Newcastle

When leaving the North in July, he said:

”All the good we have done is but a little blood-letting, which has only weakened the madness, but not at all cured it; and I tremble to fear that this vile spot may still be the ruin of this island and of our faht in 1746, and putting a final end to the hopes of all the Stuarts As to cuy can be made for such brutality, it hland chiefs had on their side agreed to spare no captured eneiven to the nine of diamonds, which is called ”the curse of Scotland,” because it is said that on that card cumberland wrote his bloodthirsty order

Such, in brief, was the story of Prince Charlie's gallant attedom of his ancestors Even when defeated, he would not at once leave Scotland A French squadron appeared off the coast near Edinburgh It had been sent to bring hie supply of money, but he turned his back upon it and hlands on foot, closely pursued by English soldiers and Lowland spies

This part of his career is in reality the most romantic of all He was hunted closely, almost as by hounds For weeks he had only such sleep as he could snatch during short periods of safety, and there were ti hih

It was a sort of life that he had never seen before, cli to the thunder of the cataracts, a which he often slept, with only one faithful follower to guard hihed and drank and rolled upon the grass when he was free fro caterans, hoht on fish and onions and bacon and wild foith an appetite such as he had never known at the luxurious court of Versailles or St-Germain

After the battle of Culloden the prince would have been captured had not a Scottish girl named Flora Macdonald met hi-ot him off to the Isle of Skye

There for a time it was impossible to follow hiether Such a proxi of one as both a youth and a prince On the other hand, no thought of love- seems to have entered Flora's mind If, however, we read Campbell's narrative very closely we can see that Prince Charles made every advance consistent with a delicate remembrance of her sex and services

It seeht that if she cared for hiave her every chance to show hiirl of twenty-four roarass or lay in the sunshi+ne and looked out over the sea The prince would rest his head in her lap, and she would tuers and soive to friends of hers as love-locks But to the last he was either too high or too low for her, according to her own ht He was a royal prince, the heir to a throne, or else he was a boy hoht play quite fancy-free A lover he could not be-so pure and beautiful was her thought of hihtful days of all his life, as they were a beautiful memory in hers In tiues that surrounded that other Stuart prince who styled hi in exile As he watched the artifice and the plotting of these ht of his innocent cohland wilds

As for Flora, she was arrested and ilish vessels of war After her release she was married, in 1750; and she and her husband sailed for the American colonies just before the Revolution In that war Macdonald becaainst his adopted countrymen Perhaps because of this reason Flora returned alone to Scotland, where she died at the age of sixty-eight

The royal prince ould have given her his easy love lived a life of far less dignity in the years that followed his return to France There was no lish throne For him there were left only the idle and licentious diversions of such a court as that in which his father lived

At the death of Jarated, and Prince Charles led a roving life under the title of Earl of Albany In his wanderings he hter of a Ger She was only nineteen years of age when she first felt the fascination that he still possessed; but it was an unhappy irl when she discovered that her husband was a confir after, in fact, she found her life with him so utterly intolerable that she persuaded the Pope to allow her a formal separation The pontiff intrusted her to her husband's brother, Cardinal York, who placed her in a convent and presently reins another roreat Italian poet and dramatist Alfieri was a man of wealth In early years he divided his ti which he either studied hard in civil and canonical law, or was a constant attendant upon the race-course, or rushed aimlessly all over Europe without any object except to wear out the post-horses which he used in relays over hundreds of miles of road His life, indeed, was eccentric almost to insanity; but when he had met the beautiful and lonely Countess of Albany there cae She influenced hiood, and he used to say that he owed her all that was best in his drae her royal husband died, a worn-out, bloated wreck of one who had been as a youth ahis final years he had fallen to utter destitution, and there was either a touch of half contee III, who bestowed upon the prince an annual pension of four thousand pounds It showed land was now consolidated under Hanoverian rule

When Cardinal York died, in 1807, there was no Stuart left in the male line; and the countess was the last to bear the royal Scottish name of Albany

After the prince's death hisis said to have been married to Alfieri, and for the rest of her life she lived in Florence, though Alfieri died nearly twenty-one years before her

Here we have seen a part of the romance which attaches itself to the nahlanders against the bayonets of the British, lolling idly a the Hebrides, or fallen, at the last, to be a drunkard and the husband of an unwilling consort, who in her turn loved a famous poet But it is this Stuart, after all, of e think e hear the bagpipes skirling ”Over the Water to Charlie” or ”Wha'll be King but Charlie?”

END OF VOLUME ONE