acter. At Armadale, she procured a change of clothes, and took as
her personal attendant an honest girl, named Kate Macdonald, who could
speak nothing but Gaelic. This girl offered herself as a servant,
finding that Flora could get no one else to attend her in her calamity.

Among her companions in trouble, she found, on returning to the ship,
Captain O'Neil, who had persuaded her to undertake the enterprise which
had produced her present imprisonment. This gentleman had also, when he
urged her good offices, proffered his hand in marriage, in order that
her reputation might not suffer by her adventure by "flood and field."
When Flora saw him on board the vessel, she went up to him, and slapping
him on the cheek, said, "To that black face I owe all my misfortune!"
O'Neil however answered, "that, instead of being her misfortune, it was
her highest honour, and it would yet redound more to her credit, if she
did not pretend to be ashamed of what she had done."[304] She was
confined for a short time in Dunstaffnage castle. This now ruinous
fortress, once a royal residence, is situated near the mouth of Loch
Etive, a short distance from Oban, in Argyleshire; it stands upon a
rocky promontory which juts out into the lake, which is one of the most
secluded and solemn scenes that nature, in all the grandeur of those
regions, presents.[305] Near the castle is a convenient building, which
is now, as probably it was in 1745, inhabited by the factors of the Duke
of Argyle, who is the hereditary keeper of Dunstaffnage castle, under
the Crown. It was probably in this house that Flora was lodged. The
castle is on three of its sides little else than a shell; but the fourth
is in tolerable repair. The entrance to this sequestered and solemn
abode is from the sea, by a staircase; probably in old times a
drawbridge, which fell from a staircase. The ancient grandeur of
Dunstaffnage, long used as one of the earliest residences of the
Scottish kings; famed also as the place from which the stone of
Dunstaffnage, sometimes called the Stone of Scone, on which they were
crowned, was brought; had long passed away before Flora tenanted its
chambers. But the associations which it presented were not likely to dim
the ardour of her loyalty to the last of that race who had once held
their sway over the proud castle of Dunstaffnage; nor would the roofless
chapel, of exquisite architectural beauty, near Dunstaffnage, where many
of the Scottish kings repos