It was the proud boast of the late Mr Charles James Stuart, of Balquhalloch, N.B., that he was the direct representative and lawful heir of the unfortunate royal family of Scotland. I do not quite know how he derived his descent, or from whom; but I feel sure that, had he lived at the beginning of the eighteenth instead of the nineteenth century, he would, with considerable confidence, have contested the right of Queen Anne and the earlier Georges to reign over the northern, if not also the southern portion of Great Britain. He was not born, however, until 1796; and at that time there were in the Highlands but few people who still chafed under Hanoverian rule. When, therefore, as a young man, he first went to London, instead of plotting rebellion against the authority of King George III., he fell in love with an English girl named Eleanor Tudor, who also claimed, and, I think, not without justice, to be lineally descended from royal ancestors. A portrait of this lady was until quite recently in the possession of her daughter, Miss Stuart. She was not beautiful; and I strongly suspect that Mr Stuart would not have wooed her, had she borne any other name than Tudor; but the prospect of once more uniting the old kingly stocks of England and Scotland proved too seductive to be resisted; and in the summer of 1817, the laird married Miss Tudor at St James’s, Piccadilly, and at once carried her off to his northern home. In the following year, Mrs Stuart gave birth to the above-mentioned daughter, who in due course received the name of Henrietta Maria; and when in 1820 a son was also born at Balquhalloch, he was, with equal fittingness, baptised Charles Augustus. The old laird died in 1861; but in the meantime his son had grown up and married a pretty but penniless governess; and in 1857 a son, who was named Charles Edward, had been born to him. Mr Charles Augustus Stuart, who, I regret to say, had more respect for whisky than for his magnificent ancestry, was seized with apoplexy in 1878, shortly afterwards departing this life; and in 1880, when the events which I am about to narrate began, the only living representatives of the old laird were his daughter Henrietta Maria, an eccentric lady of sixty-two; and his grandson Charles Edward, a lively and, I may add, rather unscrupulous fellow of three-and-twenty.