and beheld an outpost of four or five
soldiers lying by their watch-fire. They were all asleep except the
sentinel, who paced backwards and forwards with his firelock on his
shoulder, which glanced red in the light of the fire as he crossed and
re-crossed before it in his short walk, casting his eye frequently to
that part of the heavens from which the moon, hitherto obscured by mist,
seemed now about to make her appearance.

In the course of a minute or two, by one of those sudden changes of
atmosphere incident to a mountainous country, a breeze arose and swept
before it the clouds which had covered the horizon, and the night planet
poured her full effulgence upon a wide and blighted heath, skirted indeed
with copse-wood and stunted trees in the quarter from which they had
come, but open and bare to the observation of the sentinel in that to
which their course tended. The wall of the sheep-fold indeed concealed
them as they lay, but any advance beyond its shelter seemed impossible
without certain discovery.

The Highlander eyed the blue vault, but far from blessing the useful
light with Homer's, or rather Pope's benighted peasant, he muttered a
Gaelic curse upon the unseasonable splendour of MacFarlane's buat (i.e.
lantern) [Footnote: See Note 26]. He looked anxiously around for a few
minutes, and then apparently took his resolution. Leaving his attendant
with Waverley, after motioning to Edward to remain quiet, and giving his
comrade directions in a brief whisper, he retreated, favoured by the
irregularity of the ground, in the same direction and in the same manner
as they had advanced. Edward, turning his head after him, could perceive
him crawling on all fours with the dexterity of an Indian, availing
himself of every bush and inequality to escape observation, and never
passing over the more exposed parts of his track until the sentinel's
back was turned from him. At length he reached the thickets and underwood
which partly covered the moor in that direction, and probably extended to
the verge of the glen where Waverley had been so long an inhabitant. The
Highlander disappeared, but it was only for a few minutes, for he
suddenly issued forth from a different part of the thicket, and,
advancing boldly upon the open heath as if to invite discovery, he
levelled his piece and fired at the sentinel. A wound in the arm proved a
disagreeable interruption to the poor fellow's meteorological
observations, as well as to the