366 FIELD AND FERN. 



of the children can never come either to school or 

 church, but crouch round the embers with hardly a 

 rag to cover their nakedness. A Skye minister's life 

 must be a weary one ; and an old tourist thus 

 quaintly expressed his sense of it : "I'm so sorry 

 for them, that, whenever I see a Times newspaper 

 lying about, I always direct it off to them at once." 



The church at Kilmuir looks like a barn on a bleak 

 headland, and is at least two miles away from the 

 graveyard where Flora Macdonald, who left five sol- 

 dier sons, sleeps the sleep of five-and- seventy years.* 

 The marble slab has fallen out of the stone, and has 

 been carried away, piece by piece, for relics ; but net- 

 tles and ragweed thrive right bravely. We turn aside 

 to look at the Balaclava-like plains behind, to read the 

 virtues of a minister's wife, and of a knight at rest 

 with very short legs ; and then pass on our way back 

 to Portree. Again it is all wild muirland, among 

 which stands the new Free Kirk and its manse, 



* The following interesting note on the subject of this grave occurs in Mr. 

 Robert Carruthers's illustrated edition of Boswell's "Journal to the He- 

 brides" : 



"Floradied on the 4thofMarch, 1790, aged68, and was interred in the church- 

 yard of Kilmuir, in a spot set apart for the graves of the Kingsburgh family. 

 The funeral was attended by about three thousand persons, all of whom were 

 served with refreshments in the old Highland fashion. Kingsburgh died on 

 the 20th September, 1795. Flora had seven children, five sons and two 

 daughters ; the sons all became officers in the army, and the daughters officers' 

 wives. The last surviving member of this family, Mrs. Major MacLeod, died 

 at Stein, in Skye, in 1831, leaving a daughter, Miss Mary MacLeod, who re- 

 sides in the same place. One of the sons, the late Colonel Macdonald, of 

 Exeter, sent a marble slab, suitably inscribed, to be placed near his mother's 

 remains, to point out the spot ; but it was broken ere it reached Skye, and 

 the whole has since been carried off piecemeal by tourists. Thus the grave of 

 Flora Macdonald remains undistinguished within the rude inclosure that 

 holds the dust of so many of the brave Kingsburgh family." 



