It may here be observed, by way of recovering breath, that if there ever had been a son of this luckless couple, the fact would have been proudly trumpeted to the world. The event the most eagerly desired by the Jacobites was the birth of an heir to the Stuarts. Had such an heir been born, to conceal the fact from the adherents of the House of Stuart would have been an act of stark madness. Such insanity would have simply authorised the House of Hanover to repudiate the claimant, if he ever should assume that character.――To return to the romance of history:―― The infant prince received by the commodore was brought up by him as his own son. The young adventurer was trained to the sea, and he cruised among the western isles of Scotland. He appears in the romance as the _Red Eagle_; by those who know him he is treated with ‘Your Highness’ and ‘My Lord;’ and, like Lieut. Thomas Allen himself, he contracts a marriage with a lady, which is reckoned as a misalliance by those who are acquainted with his real history. He drops mysterious hints that the Stuart line is not so near extinction as it was generally thought to be. The better to carry the race on, the Red Eagle left, in 1831, two sons, the Chevaliers John and Charles Stuart, the former being also known as the Comte d’Albanie; and both, no doubt, sincerely believing in the rigmarole story of Lieut. Thomas Allen, _alias_ Red Eagle, _alias_ legitimate son of Charles Edward, the young Chevalier! [Sidenote: ‘_TALES OF THE LAST CENTURY._’] The ‘Tales of the Last Century’ do not say this in as many words. The book leaves a good deal to the imagination. The hero fades out of the romance something like Hiawatha, sailing into the mist after the setting sun. There is abundance of melodramatic business and properties throughout. There is mysterious scenery, appropriate music, serious and comic actors, complex machinery, ships of war sailing over impossible waters and looking as spectral as Vanderdecken’s ghastly vessel,――with booming of guns, harmonised voices of choristers, cheers of _supers_, and numerous other attractions in a dramatic way. There is nothing ‘dangerous’ in the book, though one gentleman does venture on the following Jacobite outburst:――‘Oh! if I had lived when you did――or _yet_, if he who is gone should rise again from the marble of St. Peter’s,――I am a Highlander and my father’s son,――I would have no king but Tearlach Righ nan Gael,’――no other king but Charlie.