Who is this prince, and why has he invaded this remote and desolate part of Scotland? He is Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the grandson of James the Second, the son of the “old Pretender,” a gay, light-hearted, active, robust, adventurous young man of twenty-five, who since boyhood has cherished the hope of winning back the throne of his fathers. There has already been one attempt, but it was a dismal failure. Fifty-seven years ago his grandfather fled from the kingdom, and William and Mary began to reign in his stead. Then followed his aunt, Queen Anne; and at her death the Tories very nearly made his father king. The activity of the Whigs foiled them just in the nick of time, and the King of Hanover, “a wee German lairdie,” who claimed descent through his mother from James the First, was brought over and crowned. Now his son, the second George, was King of Great Britain and Ireland. A fierce continental war was now raging, and Britain was foolish enough to take a hand in it. To the exiled court, then established in Rome, England’s embarrassment was the Jacobites’ opportunity, and our young hero, “bonnie Prince Charlie,” saw that he must shoot his bolt now or never. To his father he said, “I go in search of three crowns, which I doubt not but to have the honour and happiness of laying at your Majesty’s feet. If I fail in the attempt, your next sight of me shall be in my coffin.” “Heaven forbid,” replied James, “that all the crowns in the world should rob me of my son.” Some months of delay elapsed, and then an expedition was fitted out; but the winds and waves, never kindly disposed to the Stuarts, drove it back. Weary of waiting for further French assistance, Prince Charlie determined to stake all on a desperate venture. “I will go to Scotland,” he said to Lord George Murray, one of the wisest and most trusted of his advisers, “if I take with me only a single footman.” His equipment makes us smile. He was about to challenge the might of Britain with a few hundred muskets, some broadswords, twenty small field-guns, a war-chest of £4,000, and a barrel or two of brandy. The whole story would be a farce had not the splendid spirit of young Charles lifted it into a romance. Sailing from Nantes with a little privateer and a fast brig called the _Doutelle_, he soon lost the privateer, which was driven back to harbour by a British ship. The _Doutelle_, however, skirted the eastern shores of Scotland, rounded the tempestuous north, sailed amidst the islands of the west, and landed him with seven followers at Eriskay, a little island of the Hebrides, on July 25, 1745.