But, as I said before, Madame McAllister was hale and hearty.  This circumstance was due most probably to the admixture of Scottish blood in her veins, for her grandfather, Peter Fraser, had been one of the stanchest adherents of the young Pretender.  Disappointed in his hopes, he had come out to Quebec to help in the wars against the French, and, after his regiment had been disbanded near Rimouski, he remained in the district.  His colonel, a certain Ivan McAllister, persuaded many of his men to remain in that part of the country with him, cherishing the quixotic hope that in this new world he might form a kingdom over which his idol, Prince Chairlie, should reign.

However, after struggling for some years to make a stronghold for his rather erratic chieftain, he at length lost heart and gave up his idea.

Most of his men remained in the district, and intermarried with the French families already settled there.

Poor Colonel McAllister never got over the blow to his hopes.  For the sake of the bonnie prince, so unworthy of his true devotion, he had been estranged from his family, and had spent his small fortune in coming to Canada.  Here he was, perforce, obliged to remain.

After a while he settled down as a farmer, and managed to make enough to keep body and soul together.  Perhaps one of the most sensible things he ever did was to marry Eugenie Laforge, the daughter of the mayor of Rimouski.  She was a pretty girl, and had a nice little fortune, for money went further in those days than it does now; and thus the McAllisters were fairly well to do.

Their life for ten years was a happy, uneventful one, most of it spent by the colonel in writing an account of Prince Charlie’s adventures.  This unfortunate young man, I need hardly remind the reader, had long ago, in the dissipations of various European courts, forgotten that there still existed such a person as Ivan McAllister.

True, the colonel did give certain spare hours to the education of his son, but the Prince was ever first in his mind.  One morning,—­strangely enough, the anniversary of the battle of Culloden—­Ivan McAllister died quietly after a few hours’ illness.  Even at the last he was true to his idol, for his parting words were not addressed to wife or child, but it seemed that memory, bridging over the gulf of years, brought him back to the old days, and there was something very pathetic in his dying words:  “Oh, my Prince, my bonnie Prince, I shall see you soon!”

He was buried, according to a wish he had expressed some years before, in the churchyard of Rimouski, and at the head of his grave was placed a roughly hewn cross, bearing on it this inscription:  “Here lies Ivan McAllister, Colonel, of the 200th Regiment of Highlanders, second son of The McAllister of Dunmorton Castle Fife, Scotland.  R. I. P.”

In his later days Ivan McAllister had, under the influence of the cure of Rimouski, become a devout Roman Catholic.