Miss MacDonald is Protestant, and is descended of the family of Clanranald by her father, and of an Episcopal clergyman by her mother. She is daughter of the deceast Ranald MacDonald of Milton in South Uist, in which island (when the Prince was skulking thereabouts) she happened to be visiting her brother-german who had a little before taken up house at Milton. She was not many days there till she was engaged in the hazardous enterprize; and when she returned to her mother in Sky, the honest old woman was surprized to see her, and asked the reason why she had made such a short stay with her brother. Miss replied that things being in a hurry and confusion in South Uist, with such a number of military folks, she was uneasy till she got out of it; but she never once hinted at the adventure she had so successfully managed, of which the mother knew nothing at all till a party came to take the daughter prisoner, although Miss had been with her [Sidenote: _fol._ 201.] mother eight or ten days before she was seized. Immediately Miss Flora was hurried on board of a sloop of war without being allowed the priviledge of taking leave of her mother, or telling her anything of the matter, or taking along with herself one stitch to change another. The sloop called the _Greyhound_, or rather the _Furnace_, was commanded by John Ferguson of Aberdeenshire,[92] a man remarkably rigid and severe in his way, but one of too much greedy sense to have butchered the Prince if he had fallen into his hands. For when he was asked by a friend of his own[93] in Edinburgh what he would have done with the Prince had he got him into his clutches, whether or not he would have dispatched him, he answered, 'No (by G----), I would have been so far from doing any such thing that I would have preserved him as the apple of mine eye, for I would not take any man's word, no, not the Duke of Cumberland's for £30,000 Sterling, though I knew many to be such fools as to do it.' Ferguson was more [Sidenote: _fol._ 202.] than once (as he thought) within an hour of catching the Prince, so closely he pursued the royal wanderer, and such an anxiety he had to touch the price of blood. [92] See ff. 216-218, 690, 873, 922. [93] Mrs. Ferguson of Pitfour. It was Miss MacDonald's good fortune to be soon removed out of the hands of Ferguson into those of the polite and generous Commodore Smith, who, in the coursing about, obtained leave of General Campbell to allow Miss to go ashore to visit her mother and to seek a servant to attend her in the state of confinement. Then it was that poor Kate MacDonal generously made an offer to run all risques with the captive lady, who gladly accepted.