When these sounds had died upon the silence of the night, the Highlanders began their march swiftly, yet with the most cautious silence.  Waverley had little time, or indeed disposition, for observation, and could only discern that they passed at some distance from a large building, in the windows of which a light or two yet seemed to twinkle.  A little farther on the leading Highlander snuffed the wind like a setting spaniel, and then made a signal to his party again to halt.  He stooped down upon all fours, wrapped up in his plaid, so as to be scarce distinguishable from the heathy ground on which he moved, and advanced in this posture to reconnoitre.  In a short time he returned, and dismissed his attendants excepting one; and, intimating to Waverley that he must imitate his cautious mode of proceeding, all three crept forward on hands and knees.

After proceeding a greater way in this inconvenient manner than was at all comfortable to his knees and shins, Waverley perceived the smell of smoke, which probably had been much sooner distinguished by the more acute nasal organs of his guide.  It proceeded from the corner of a low and ruinous sheep-fold, the walls of which were made of loose stones, as is usual in Scotland.  Close by this low wall the Highlander guided Waverley, and, in order probably to make him sensible of his danger, or perhaps to obtain the full credit of his own dexterity, he intimated to him, by sign and example, that he might raise his head so as to peep into the sheep-fold.  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 Mac-Farlane’s buat (i.e. lantern) [Footnote:  See Note 1].  He looked anxiously around for a few minutes, and then apparently took his resolution.  Leaving his attendant with Waverley, after motioning to Edward