Keith and his brother, after ‘lurcking’ for months in the Northern wilds, escaped from Aberdeen to Holland, in September 1719. Thence they made for Spain, intending to enter France by Sedan. But as they had no passports they were stopped in France and imprisoned. Keith hit on an ingenious way of getting rid of their Spanish commissions, which would have been compromising, and a letter to the Earl from the Princesse de Conti served as a voucher for their respectability, and procured their release. They reached Paris when the fever of the Mississippi Scheme was at its height. Jacobites as needy as they, the Oglethorpe girls and George Kelly, probably got hints from Law, the great financial adventurer, and founder of the Mississippi Scheme. The young Jacobite ladies bought in at par and sold at a huge premium. They thus won their own _dots_, and married great French nobles. Even poor George Kelly had a success in speculation. He was, at this time, Atterbury’s secretary, and being involved in his fall, passed fourteen years in the Tower. In 1745 he was one of the famed Seven Men of Moidart, but none the dearer on that account to the Earl, who never trusted him, and, in 1750, caused him to be banished from the service of the Prince. All these adventurers, Law, the Oglethorpes, Olive Trant, Kelly, and the Keiths, may have met in Paris, after Glenshiel. But the Earl and his brother did not make their fortunes in the Mississippi Scheme. They had no money, and Keith frankly expresses his contempt for the speculations after which all the world was running mad. The brothers passed to Montpellier, Keith attempted to enter Spain by Toulouse, the Earl by the Pyrenees. Months later Keith tried the Pyrenees passes, and there, at an inn, met his brother, who had been arrested and imprisoned for six weeks. The King of France had just set him free, with orders to leave the kingdom, and the wandering pair of exiles went to Genoa, then a focus of Jacobite intrigue, whence they sailed to Rome, to see ‘the King, our Master.’ Jacobites lived in an eternal hurry-scurry. James had been driven from France to Lorraine; then to Avignon, where Stair planned his assassination;[8] then to Urbino, Bologna, and Rome. Sailing for Spain, in 1719, he had been obliged to put in near Hyères, and there to dance all night—the melancholy monarch—at a ball in a rural inn. Spain could do nothing for him, and he returned to Rome, whither Charles Wogan brought him a bride, fair, unhappy Clementina Sobieska, just rescued from an Austrian prison. Keith says nothing of her, but tells how, at Cestri de Levanti, his brother called on Cardinal Alberoni, now fallen from power and in exile. The Earl, with some lack of humour, wanted to tell the Cardinal all about the Glenshiel fiasco, but was informed that the statesman had no longer the faintest concern with the affairs of Spain or interest in the gloomy theme.