; and on what should the doctor's casual glance not rest
but a miniature, thrown carelessly among the scent bottles and jewels,
and in which he instantly recognised a portrait of Charles Edward such
as he had seen him riding on the field of Culloden! But in a moment,
when he glanced again from his writing to the toilet-table, the
miniature was no longer visible.

The lady having apparently recovered, Dr. Beaton was dismissed,
blindfolded as he had come, but only after having taken an oath upon the
crucifix "never to speak of what he had heard, or seen, or thought,
that night, except it should be in the service of King Charles," and
also to quit Tuscany immediately. He repaired, therefore, to the nearest
seaport, but was detained there three days before the departure of his
ship. One moonlight evening, as he was walking on the sands, he was
surprised by seeing an English man-of-war at anchor. In answer to his
enquiries, she proved to be the _Albina_, Commodore O'Haloran. While he
was lying in a sequestered corner, watching the frigate, he was startled
by the sudden appearance of a small closed carriage and of a horseman,
in whom, by the moonlight, he immediately recognised the moustached
stranger of St. Rosalie. The cavalcade stopped at the water's brink,
and the horseman blew a shrill whistle. Immediately a man-of-war's boat
shot from behind some rocks and pulled straight towards them. A man with
glimmering epaulettes sprang from the boat on to the beach, and helped
into it a lady, who had alighted from the carriage, and carried something
wrapped in a shawl. Dr. Beaton heard the cry of an infant, the soothing
voice of the lady; and, a moment later, after a word and shake of the
hand with the moustached man, the boat pulled off from shore. "For
more than a quarter of an hour the tall black figure of the cavalier
continued fixed upon the same spot, and in the same attitude; but
suddenly the broad gigantic shadow of the frigate swung round in the
moonshine, her sails filled to the breeze, and dimly brightening in the
light, she bore off slow and still and stately towards the west."

Such is the adventure of Dr. Beaton, and thus he is said to have related
it, in the year 1831, eighty-five years after the battle of Culloden,
where he had himself seen Charles Edward; whence it is presumable that
the doctor was considerably over a hundred when he made the disclosure.
This story of Doctor Beaton was published, not in a historic