Flora MacDonald to Dr. Johnson, 1773

Nay, Doctor, it was not for the prompting of the swords or for the jostling of the bayonets that I took it to mind to do it; nor for the men, whether auld or bare bairns, who lay cooling their veins on the heather. Neither was there in me or mine hope of petticoats or favours when we took the young man through.

You have paid me many compliments, Doctor, as to call me a woman of soft features, of gentle manners, of, God save you, an elegant presence; but such as these must wither be they not housed in a kind soul.

I was no heedless overblown girl-child when I met Prince Charles; I was a grown woman a cast above twenty and some among my kin had said that I would cost them no dower but was likely to spare them no feeding in my age. It was a strange e’en then, when they came chieftain, prince, and all from Dunvegan a-pleading to my skirts.

I looked over the young gentleman and I thought what some had said of him; that he was Italian and no blood of ours by birth, of the Romish persuasion, that he had left our friends and our cousins to suffer in a cold pass. I heard alike the beseeching of Kingsburgh, that the slight laddie was all we had of hope.

I thought of the gold promised on warrants, and the chill eyes of the country ministers, and as I held out my hand to Charlie’s kiss I thought then, yon boy will look more handsome in ain of my auld frocks than upon the gibbets of Butcher Cumberland.

'The Children of Lir'

It teetered there, snagged by its strap,
Jacob's rucksack, and in it, all we could remember,
Was on the rocks, weren't it now. Therein the golden
Defile of yellow pallades; oh, there where
They lived and they could last, the ragged staves
Each at the two others, striped bannering limbs -
All this, as I say, to the sea for a kiss;
It was time to get going,

I thought; disembark,
I walked down as comely a way as the stripcourse,
Island, to islet, in through the lagoon,
Thinking about pinkness was laid in that passing
Hard flowers and movingly fouled up pink stamps.

And I took it across both the head and my shoulder,
Knew the new felt lightness of the underwhelmed.
So I stepped to the boat, but back into the water.

Because such are times when instances can't matter
The rucksack, it can haver up that early part
But I must have dropped it; at worst in the wetness.
What alters, when I had forgotten it floats?

I had become busied
In cold anxious hands
If not malign vicious
If waiting then sure

A brocade of more or less memorable faces
To people the spaces
On Celticdom's floor.

Leaning to the one seeming most certain kind,
Perhaps as defined
Or expressible more
Smiling on yellow lanks, and sighs, I signed.

The sack lacking its rifice, the vow was no law
To the will of a child.
When they went aside all
As if asking her seal
Why not change my mind?

When the word is the mould of a thing so much smaller
Than I am, than they were, white where they could breathe
And she too engaged to the prince of the fishes
Well, talk about telling thin things from mere fingers.