e drop."

Alan was delighted. "There are whiles," said he, "when ye are altogether
too canny and Whiggish to be company for a gentleman like me; but there
come other whiles when ye show yoursel' a mettle spark; and it's then,
David, that I love ye like a brother."

The mist rose and died away, and showed us that country lying as waste
as the sea; only the moorfowl and the pewees crying upon it, and far
over to the east, a herd of deer, moving like dots. Much of it was red
with heather; much of the rest broken up with bogs and hags and peaty
pools; some had been burnt black in a heath fire; and in another place
there was quite a forest of dead firs, standing like skeletons. A
wearier-looking desert man never saw; but at least it was clear of
troops, which was our point.

We went down accordingly into the waste, and began to make our toilsome
and devious travel towards the eastern verge. There were the tops of
mountains all round (you are to remember) from whence we might be spied
at any moment; so it behoved us to keep in the hollow parts of the moor,
and when these turned aside from our direction to move upon its naked
face with infinite care. Sometimes, for half an hour together, we must
crawl from one heather bush to another, as hunters do when they are hard
upon the deer. It was a clear day again, with a blazing sun; the water
in the brandy bottle was soon gone; and altogether, if I had guessed
what it would be to crawl half the time upon my belly and to walk much
of the rest stooping nearly to the knees, I should certainly have held
back from such a killing enterprise.

Toiling and resting and toiling again, we wore away the morning; and
about noon lay down in a thick bush of heather to sleep. Alan took the
first watch; and it seemed to me I had scarce closed my eyes before I
was shaken up to take the second. We had no clock to go by; and Alan
stuck a sprig of heath in the ground to serve instead; so that as soon
as the shadow of the bush should fall so far to the east, I might know
to rouse him. But I was by this time so weary that I could have slept
twelve hours at a stretch; I had the taste of sleep in my throat; my
joints slept even when my mind was waking; the hot smell of the heather,
and the drone of the wild bees, were like possets to me; and every now
and again I would give a jump and find I had been dozing.

The last time I woke I seemed to come back from farther away, and
thought the sun had taken a