Waverley, with better regulated curiosity than his attendant’s, dismounted, and gave his horse to a boy who stood idling near.  It arose, perhaps, from the shyness of his character in early youth, that he felt dislike at applying to a stranger even for casual information, without previously glancing at his physiognomy and appearance.  While he looked about in order to select the person with whom he would most willingly hold communication, the buzz around saved him in some degree the trouble of interrogatories.  The names of Lochiel, Clanronald, Glengarry, and other distinguished Highland Chiefs, among whom Vich Ian Vohr was repeatedly mentioned, were as familiar in men’s mouths as household words; and from the alarm generally expressed, he easily conceived that their descent into the Lowlands, at the head of their armed tribes, had either already taken place, or was instantly apprehended.

Ere Waverley could ask particulars, a strong, large-boned, hard-featured woman, about forty, dressed as if her clothes had been flung on with a pitchfork, her cheeks flushed with a scarlet red where they were not smutted with soot and lamp-black, jostled through the crowd, and, brandishing high a child of two years old, which she danced in her arms, without regard to its screams of terror, sang forth, with all her might,—­

     ’Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling,
     Charlie is my darling,
     The young Chevalier!

‘D’ye hear what’s come ower ye now,’ continued the virago, ’ye whingeing Whig carles?  D’ye hear wha’s coming to cow yer cracks?

     Little wot ye wha’s coming,
     Little wot ye wha’s coming,
     A’ the wild Macraws are coming.’

The Vulcan of Cairnvreckan, who acknowledged his Venus in this exulting Bacchante, regarded her with a grim and ire-foreboding countenance, while some of the senators of the village hastened to interpose.  ’Whisht, gudewife; is this a time, or is this a day, to be singing your ranting fule sangs in?—­a time when the wine of wrath is poured out without mixture in the cup of indignation, and a day when the land should give testimony against popery, and prelacy, and quakerism, and independency, and supremacy, and erastianism, and antinomianism, and a’ the errors of the church?’

‘And that’s a’ your Whiggery,’ re-echoed the Jacobite heroine; ’that’s a’ your Whiggery, and your presbytery, ye cut-lugged, graning carles!  What! d’ye think the lads wi’ the kilts will care for yer synods and yer presbyteries, and yer buttock-mail, and yer stool o’ repentance?  Vengeance on the black face o’t!  Mony an honester woman’s been set upon it than streeks doon beside ony Whig in the country.  I mysell’—­

Here John Mucklewrath, who dreaded her entering upon a detail of personal experience, interposed his matrimonial authority.  ’Gae hame, and be d—­ (that I should say sae), and put on the sowens for supper.’