The family did not follow him into exile immediately, but his devoted wife reached Navy Island a few hours before the dramatic moment when Drew arrived and the _Caroline_ became a torch. Like Deborah, she, too, might have said, “I will surely go with thee, notwithstanding the journey shall not be for thine honour.” The general belief is that, though loyal to him and a staunch Reformer, she by no means sympathised in his ultra opinions and combustive action. She remained for two weeks in that dreadful place, made flannel cartridge-bags, slept in a rough log shanty on a shelf covered with straw, where the walls were poor protection from wet and cold and but a thin partition from the unholy clamour of the desperate crowd about her, and tried to inspire her husband and his followers by an example of courage and freedom from fear. Then ill-health obliged her to leave, and when accompanying her to the house of a friend in Buffalo Mackenzie was arrested for breach of the neutrality laws. Scylla and Charybdis, the devil and the deep sea, a dilemma with the orthodox number of horns, lose all strength as similes at this point of the small hero’s career. The devotion of Mackenzie’s mother, like that of most mothers, begins at the date of his birth. She was her husband’s senior by nineteen years and old for a first experience of motherhood. The husband’s death followed soon after, and then came the vows which her Church prescribed for the orphaned infant’s baptism, a struggle with misfortune, and a determination to keep a roof over their two heads. Strange to say, both grandparents were Mackenzies,--one Black Colin, or Colin Dhu--and both Loyalists who fought for the Stuarts. In 1801 there was a grievous famine, and one of the earliest memories of “the bright boy with yellow hair--wearing a blue short coat with yellow buttons,” is that of his mother taking the chief treasure of her kist, a plaid of her own clan tartan and spun with her own hands when a girl, to sell for bread. As he lay in his bed and watched her take it out--not with tears we may be sure, Mrs. Mackenzie was no crying woman--did this earnest of future days of want and care shadow the equally heroic spirit of the child. The priest-grey coat of his father had to follow. “Well may I love the poor, greatly may I esteem the humble and the lowly, for poverty and adversity were my nurses, and in my youth were want and misery my familiar friends,” he wrote later. Divine worship was held in that family of two, and it was a daily prayer that the rightful monarch might be set upon the throne, with the saving clause--prophetic glimpses of a Family Compact--that he might have able and wise counsellers, added.