Mr. Graham did not, however,
dare to be his guide down to the sea-shore, but gave him careful
directions as to his following an old woman who had been provided for
this purpose. But all Mr. Graham's precautions would have been useless,
had not chance once more favoured the Chevalier. His protectress decided
that it would be dangerous to allow him to loiter about the shore while
the boat was getting ready for sea, so she told her charge to wait for
her on the road on top of the hill, and she would return and fetch him
when all was ready. Half an hour passed very slowly: the sun was
sinking, and the Chevalier grew impatient. He left the road by which he
had been sitting, and lay down in a furrow a few yards off, nearer the
brow of the hill, so that he might perceive his guide at the earliest
moment. Scarcely had he changed his quarters, than he heard the sound of
horses, and peeping cautiously out, 'saw eight or ten horsemen pass in
the very place he had just quitted.' No sooner were they out of sight,
than the old woman arrived, trembling with fright. 'Ah!' she exclaimed
in a transport of joy, 'I did not expect to find you here.' She then
explained that the horsemen were English dragoons, and that they had so
threatened the boatmen engaged by Mr. Graham that they absolutely
refused to fulfil their compact. This was a terrible blow to the
Chevalier, but he declined to listen to the old woman's advice and
return for shelter to Mr. Graham, and after much persuasion, induced his
guide to show him the way to the public-house by the sea-shore. Here he
was welcomed by the landlady, whose son had been likewise 'out' with the
Prince, but neither her entreaties nor those of the Chevalier could move
the boatmen from their resolution. They even resisted the prayers of the
landlady's two beautiful daughters, till the girls, disgusted and
indignant with such cowardice, offered to row him across themselves.

'We left Broughty Ferry,' he writes in his memoirs, 'at ten o'clock in
the evening, and reached the opposite shore about midnight.' He then
took an affectionate leave of his preservers, and proceeded, footsore as
he was, to walk to St. Andrews. At this time Johnstone seems to have
felt more physically exhausted than at almost any other moment of his
travels; and it was only by dint of perpetually washing his sore and
bleeding feet in the streams he passed, that he managed to reach St.
Andrews towards eight o'clock. He at once made