But what a dying
man can suffer firmly may kill a living friend to look upon. This same
law of high treason,' he continued, with astonishing firmness and
composure, 'is one of the blessings, Edward, with which your free country
has accommodated poor old Scotland; her own jurisprudence, as I have
heard, was much milder. But I suppose one day or other--when there are no
longer any wild Highlanders to benefit by its tender mercies--they will
blot it from their records as levelling them with a nation of cannibals.
The mummery, too, of exposing the senseless head--they have not the wit
to grace mine with a paper coronet; there would be some satire in that,
Edward. I hope they will set it on the Scotch gate though, that I may
look, even after death, to the blue hills of my own country, which I love
so dearly. The Baron would have added,
Moritur, et moriens dukes reminiscitur Argos.'
A bustle, and the sound of wheels and horses' feet, was now heard in the
court-yard of the Castle. 'As I have told you why you must not follow me,
and these sounds admonish me that my time flies fast, tell me how you
found poor Flora.'
Waverley, with a voice interrupted by suffocating sensations, gave some
account of the state of her mind.
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