Let us picture the scene. The French frigate lies off the little rocky isle, and the prince is eager to go ashore. During the brief voyage he has exercised that extraordinary personal magnetism with which he is endowed, and every man on board is his willing slave. No one, not even Napoleon, ever possessed so much of that strange attraction which can capture the imagination of men and women, and make them leave home, kindred, and friends in order to throw themselves into a perilous and ruinous cause. As the needle points to the pole, so do all men’s hearts turn to him, whether in sunshine or in storm, in defeat or in victory. As the French frigate comes to her anchorage an eagle hovers over the ship. “Sire,” says old Tullibardine, “the king of birds has come to welcome your royal highness.” A few hours later Charles trod the soil of Scotland for the first time. The day was wet and stormy, and the opening of the campaign was most inauspicious. Next day a neighbouring chief, Macdonald of Boisdale, was sent for. He came “over the water to Charlie,” but bluntly advised the prince to return home. With that readiness of speech which marked him, the prince replied, “I am come home, sir, and I will entertain no notion of returning to that place from whence I came. I am persuaded that my faithful Highlanders will stand by me.” He refused to be rebuffed, and forthwith crossed in the French ship to the coast of Inverness, where he summoned the gallant Lochiel and other leading chiefs to meet him. And now his fate seemed to rest on the goodwill of a single man. Lochiel had already denounced Charles’s invasion as a rash and desperate undertaking, and he was in no mood to join the prince. Other leading men shook their heads, though Charles pleaded his cause with all the earnestness of despair, pacing up and down the deck, and pouring forth a torrent of eloquent words.