O Death! O Time! O men and women of whom we have read, what eager but unavailing hands we stretch towards you! How we would hear your voices, see your faces, but note the wafture of your garments! With a strange feeling one paces round the ruins of the House of Corrichatachin, thinking of the debauch held therein a hundred years ago by a dead Boswell and young Highland bloods, dead too. But the ruin of the old house of Kingsburgh moves one more than the ruin of the old house of Corrichatachin. On the shore of Loch Snizort--waters shadowed once by the sails of Haco's galleys--we stumble on the latter ancient site. The outline of the walls is distinguished by a mere protuberance on the grassy turf; and in the space where fires burned, and little feet pattered, and men and women ate and drank, and the hospitable board smoked, great trees are growing. To this place did Flora Macdonald come and the prince--his head worth thirty thousand pounds--dressed in woman's clothes; there they rested for the night, and departed next morning. And the sheets in which the wanderer slept were carefully put aside, and years after they became the shroud for the lady of the house. And the old shoes the prince wore were kept by Kingsburgh till his dying day, and after that a "zealous Jacobite gentleman" paid twenty guineas for the treasure. That love for the young Ascanius!--the carnage of Culloden, and noble blood reddening many scaffolds, could not wash it out. Fancy his meditations on all that devotion when an old besotted man in Rome--the glitter of the crown of his ancestors faded utterly away out of his bleared and tipsy eyes! And when Flora was mistress of it, to the same place came Boswell, and Johnson with a cold in his head. There the doctor saluted Flora, and snivelled his compliments, and slept in the bed the prince occupied. There Boswell was in a cordial humour, and, as his fashion was, "promoted a cheerful glass." And all these people are ghosts and less. And, as I write, the wind is rising on Loch Snizort, and through the autumn rain the yellow leaves are falling on the places where the prince and the doctor and the toady sat. [Sidenote: Flora Macdonald and Dr Johnson.]