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
re-crossed 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 copse-wood 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 sheep-fold 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 MacFarlane's buat (i.
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