minable array of troops, five
abreast, marching from the eminence and over the cleft as before. All
the family saw this, and the manoeuvres of the force, as each
company was kept in order by a mounted officer, who galloped this way
and that. As the shades of twilight came on, the discipline appeared
to relax, and the troops intermingled, and rode at unequal paces, till
all was lost in darkness. Now of course all the Lancasters were
insulted, as their servant had been; but their justification was not
long delayed.

"On the Midsummer Eve of the fearful 1745, twenty-six persons,
expressly summoned by the family, saw all that had been seen before,
and more. Carriages were now interspersed with the troops; and
everybody knew that no carriages had been, or could be, on the summit
of Souter Fell. The multitude was beyond imagination; for the troops
filled a space of half a mile, and marched quickly till night hid
them--still marching. There was nothing vaporous or indistinct about
the appearance of these spectres. So real did they seem, that some of
the people went up, the next morning, to look for the hoof-marks of
the horses; and awful it was to them to find not one foot-print on
heather or grass. The witnesses attested the whole story on oath
before a magistrate; and fearful were the expectations held by the
whole country-side about the coming events of the Scotch rebellion.

"It now comes out that two other persons had seen something of the
sort in the interval--_viz._, in 1743--but had concealed it, to escape
the insults to which their neighbours were subjected. Mr. Wren, of
Wilton Hall, and his farm servant, saw, one summer evening, a man and
a dog on the mountain, pursuing some horses along a place so steep
that a horse could hardly by any possibility keep a footing on it.
Their speed was prodigious, and their disappearance at the south end
of the fell so rapid, that Mr. Wren and the servant went up, the next
morning, to find the body of the man who must have been killed. Of
man, horse, or dog, they found not a trace and they came down and held
their tongues. When they did speak, they fared not much better for
having twenty-six sworn comrades in their disgrace.

"As for the explanation, the editor of the _Lonsdale Magazine_
declared (vol. ii., p. 313) that it was discovered that on the
Midsummer Eve of 1745 the rebels were 'exercising on the western coast
of Scotland, whose movements had been reflected by some transp