of lightning, as he at first thought it, shot from the nearest group of
foes, flashed over his head, and striking what remained of the roof,
stood trembling in it, an arrow of blazing fire. The appearance of this
missile, followed, as it immediately was, by several others discharged
from the same tow, confirmed the soldier's resolution to remove the
females, while it greatly increased his anxiety; for although there was
little fear that the flames could be communicated from the arrows to the
roof so deeply saturated by the late rains, yet each, while burning,
served, like a flambeau, to illuminate the ruins below, and must be
expected before long to reveal the helplessness of the party, and to
light the besiegers to their prey.

With such fears on his mind, he hesitated no longer to remove his cousin
and her companion to the ravine; which was effected with but little risk
or difficulty, the ravine heading, as was mentioned before, under the
floor of the hovel itself, and its borders being so strewn with broken
timbers and planks, as to screen the party from observation. He concealed
them both among the rocks and brambles with which the hollow abounded,
listened a moment to the rush of the flood as it swept the precipitous
bank, and the roar with which it seemed struggling among rocky
obstructions above, and smiling with the grim thought, that, when
resistance was no longer availing, there was yet a refuge for his
kinswoman within the dark bosom of those troubled waters, to which he
felt, with the stern resolution of a Roman father rather than of a
Christian lover, that he could, when nothing else remained, consign her
with his own hands, he returned to the ruins, to keep up the appearance
of still defending it, and to preserve the entrance of the ravine.

CHAPTER XVI.

The flaming arrows were still shot in vain at the water-soaked roof, and
the combustibles with which they were armed, burning out very rapidly,
produced hut little of that effect in illuminating the ruins which Roland
had apprehended, and for which they had been perhaps in part designed;
and, in consequence, the savages soon ceased to shoot them. A more useful
ally to the besiegers was promised in the moon, which was now rising over
the woods, and occasionally revealing her wan and wasted crescent through
gaps in the clouds. Waning in her last quarter, and struggling amid banks
of vapour, she yet retained sufficient, magnitude and lustre, when ri