Waverley did so, 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
recrossed 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 copsewood 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 sheepfold, 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 MAC-FARLANE'S BUAT
(i.
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