come sound of the drum, Major Melville hastily
opened a sashed door, and stepped out upon a sort of terrace which
divided his house from the high-road from which the martial music
proceeded. Waverley and his new friend followed him, though probably
he would have dispensed with their attendance. They soon recognized in
solemn march, first, the performer upon the drum; secondly, a large
flag of four compartments, on which were inscribed the words COVENANTS,
RELIGION, KING, KINGDOMES. The person who was honoured with this charge
was followed by the commander of the party, a thin, dark, rigid-looking
man, about sixty years old. The spiritual pride, which in mine Host of
the Candlestick mantled in a sort of supercilious hypocrisy, was, in
this man's face, elevated and yet darkened by genuine and undoubting
fanaticism. It was impossible to behold him without imagination
placing him in some strange crisis, where religious zeal was the ruling
principle. A martyr at the stake, a soldier in the field, a lonely and
banished wanderer consoled by the intensity and supposed purity of his
faith under every earthly privation; perhaps a persecuting inquisitor,
as terrible in power as unyielding in adversity; any of these seemed
congenial characters to this personage. With these high traits of
energy, there was something in the affected precision and solemnity of
his deportment and discourse, that bordered upon the ludicrous; so that,
according to the mood of the spectator's mind, and the light under which
Mr. Gilfillan presented himself, one might have feared; admired, or
laughed at him. His dress was that of a west-country peasant, of
better materials indeed than that of the lower rank, but in no respect
affecting either the mode of the age, or of the Scottish gentry at
any period. His arms were a broadsword and pistols, which, from the
antiquity of their appearance, might have seen the rout of Pentland, or
Bothwell Brigg.

As he came up a few steps to meet Major Melville, and touched solemnly,
but slightly, his huge and overbrimmed blue bonnet, in answer to the
Major, who had courteously raised a small triangular gold-laced hat,
Waverley was irresistibly impressed with the idea that he beheld a
leader of the Roundheads of yore in conference with one of Marlborough's
captains.

The group of about thirty armed men who followed this gifted commander,
was of a motley description. They were in ordinary Lowland dresses, of
different colou