passed hurriedly among them, and there was obviously an increasing disposition to resist Waverley's departure. He attempted to argue mildly with them, but his voluntary ally, Mrs Mucklewrath, broke in upon and drowned his expostulations, taking his part with an abusive violence, which was all set down to Edward's account by those on whom it was bestowed. "Ye'll stop ony gentleman that's the Prin ce's freend?" for she too, though with other feelings, had adopted the general opinion respecting Waverley. "I daur ye to touch him," spreading abroad her long and muscular fingers, garnished with claws which a vulture might have envied. "I'll set my ten commandments in the face o' the first loon that lays a finger on him."

"Gae hame, gudewife," quoth the farmer aforesaid; "it wad better set you to be nursing the gudeman's bairns than to be deaving us here."

"His bairns !" retorted the Amazon, re

garding her husband with a grin of ineffable contempt-" His bairns!

"O gin ye were dead, gudeman,

And a green turf on your head, gudeman,

Then I wad ware my widowhood

Upon a ranting Highlandman."

This canticle, which excited a suppressed titter among the younger part of the audience, totally overcame the patience of the taunted man of the anvil. "Deil be in me but I put this het gad down her throat," cried he in a rhapsody of wrath, snatching a bar from the forge; and he might have executed his threat, had he not been withheld by a part of the mob, while the rest endeavoured to force the termagant out of his presence.

Waverley meditated a retreat in the confusion, but his horse was nowhere to be seen. At length he observed, at some distance, his faithful attendant, Ebenezer,

who, as soon as he had perceived the turn matters were likely to take, had withdrawn both horses from the press, and, mounted on the one, and holding the other, answered the loud and repeated cries of Waverley for his horse, "Na, na! if ye are nae freend to kirk and the king, and are detained as siccan a person, ye maun answer to honest men of the country for breach o' contract; and I maun keep the naig and the walise for damage and expence, in respect my horse and mysell will lose tomorrow's day's wark, besides the afternoon preaching." Edward, out of patience, hemmed in and hustled by the rabble on every side, and every moment expecting personal violence, resolved to try measures of intimidation, and at length drew a pocketpistol, threatening, on the one hand, to shoot whomsoever dared to stop him, and on the other menacing Ebenezer with a similar doom, if he stirred a foot with the horses. The sapient Partridge says, that one man with a pistol is equal to an hun

dred unarmed, because, though he can shoot but one of the multitude, yet no one knows but that he himself may be that luckless individual. The levy en masse of Cairnvreckan would therefore probably have given way, nor would Ebenezer, whose natural paleness had waxed three shades more cadaverous, have ventured to dispute a mandate so enforced, had notthe Vulcan of the village, eager to discharge upon some more worthy object the fury which his helpmate had provoked, and not ill satisfied to find such an object. in Waverley, rushed at him with the redhot bar of iron, with such determination, as made the discharge of his pistol an act of self-defence. The unfortunate man fell and while Edward, thrilled with a natural horror at the incident, neither had pre-. sence of mind to unsheathe his sword, nor to draw his remaining pistol, the populace threw themselves upon him, disarmed him, and were about to use him with great violence, when the appearance of a venerable

N

clergyman, the pastor of the parish, put a curb upon their fury.

This worthy man (none of the Goukthrapples or Rentowels) maintained his character with the common people, although he preached the practical fruits of Christian faith, as well as its abstract te nets, and was respected by the higher orders, notwithstanding he declined soothing their speculative errors by converting the pulpit of the gospel into a school of heathen morality. Perhaps it is owing to this mixture of faith and practice in his doctrine, that, although his memory has formed a sort of era in the annals of Cairnvreckan, so that the parishioners, to denote what befell Sixty Years since, still say it happened in good Mr Morton's time," I have never been able to discover which he belonged to, the evangelic or the moderate party in the kirk. Nor do I hold the circumstance of much moment, since, in my own remembrance, the one was head, ed by an Erskine, the other by a Robertson.