when he glanced again from his writing to the toilet-table, the miniature was no longer visible. The lady having apparently recovered, Dr. Beaton was dismissed, blindfolded as he had come, but only after having taken an oath upon the crucifix "never to speak of what he had heard, or seen, or thought, that night, except it should be in the service of King Charles," and also to quit Tuscany immediately. He repaired, therefore, to the nearest seaport, but was detained there three days before the departure of his ship. One moonlight evening, as he was walking on the sands, he was surprised by seeing an English man-of-war at anchor. In answer to his enquiries, she proved to be the _Albina_, Commodore O'Haloran. While he was lying in a sequestered corner, watching the frigate, he was startled by the sudden appearance of a small closed carriage and of a horseman, in whom, by the moonlight, he immediately recognised the moustached stranger of St. Rosalie. The cavalcade stopped at the water's brink, and the horseman blew a shrill whistle. Immediately a man-of-war's boat shot from behind some rocks and pulled straight towards them. A man with glimmering epaulettes sprang from the boat on to the beach, and helped into it a lady, who had alighted from the carriage, and carried something wrapped in a shawl. Dr. Beaton heard the cry of an infant, the soothing voice of the lady; and, a moment later, after a word and shake of the hand with the moustached man, the boat pulled off from shore. "For more than a quarter of an hour the tall black figure of the cavalier continued fixed upon the same spot, and in the same attitude; but suddenly the broad gigantic shadow of the frigate swung round in the moonshine, her sails filled to the breeze, and dimly brightening in the light, she bore off slow and still and stately towards the west." Such is the adventure of Dr. Beaton, and thus he is said to have related it, in the year 1831, eighty-five years after the battle of Culloden, where he had himself seen Charles Edward; whence it is presumable that the doctor was considerably over a hundred when he made the disclosure. This story of Doctor Beaton was published, not in a historical work, but in a volume entitled _Tales of the Century; or Sketches of the Romance of History between the years 1746 and 1846_, published at Edinburgh in 1847. But although this book might pass as a work of imagination, and could, therefore, scarcely be impugned as a historical document, there is every reason for supposing that, while not officially claiming to reveal the existence of an heir of the Stuarts, it was deliberately intended to convey information to that effect; and as such, an anonymous writer (either Lockhart or Dennistoun) made short work of it in the _Quarterly Review_ for June 1847, from which I have derived the greater part of my knowledge of this curious "romance of history."