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Life of Flora Macdonald and her adventures with Prince Charles

(163) Page 139 - Her husband returns --- They settle at Kingsburgh --- Their deaths and funerals

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(163) Page 139 - Her husband returns --- They settle at Kingsburgh --- Their deaths and funerals
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matory complaint, which refused to yield to all the medical
skill available at the time. She possessed all her mental
faculties to the very last, and calmly departed in the presence
of her husband and two daughters.
Such is an imperfect sketch of the history of this dis-
tinguished and noble-minded woman, and of her romantic
adventures in assisting Prince Charles Edward to effect his
escape. To read the accounts of her generous and devoted
attachment to the lost cause of the last representative of
Scotland's ancient kings, is more like the creation of fiction
than a tale of sad reality. She now sleeps calmly by the
side of him whom in life she honoured with her heart, and
on whom, for about forty years, she had lavished all the
wealth, and all the generous impulses of a truly noble and
loving heart. And even still her character and virtues lead
hundreds from all quarters of the kingdom to her lonely shrine,
where they can silently muse upon her goodness, and realise
the poet's estimate of woman : —
Honoured be woman, she beams on our sight,
Graceful and fair, like a being of light,
She scatters around her, wherever she strays,
Roses of bliss on our thorn- covered ways —
Roses of Paradise sent from above,
To be gathered and twined in a garland of love.
Flora's remains were shrouded in one of the sheets in-
which the Prince had slept at the mansion of Kingsburgh.
With this sheet she never parted in all her travels. It was
religiously and faithfully preserved by her in North Carolina,
during the Revolutionary War. She had it in safe keeping
even when her own person was in danger. At length the
purpose she indended it for was accomplished, when all that
was mortal of herself was wrapt in it by her sorrowing family.
Her remains were conveyed under shade of night from
Peinduin to Kingsburgh. The coffin was carried shoulder-

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