full activity.  Nor was the labour of a rural and pacific nature.  The master smith, benempt, as his sign intimated, John Mucklewrath, with two assistants, toiled busily in arranging, repairing, and furbishing old muskets, pistols, and swords, which lay scattered around his workshop in military confusion.  The open shed, containing the forge, was crowded with persons who came and went as if receiving and communicating important news, and a single glance at the aspect of the people who traversed the street in haste, or stood assembled in groups, with eyes elevated and hands uplifted, announced that some extraordinary intelligence was agitating the public mind of the municipality of Cairnvreckan.  ‘There is some news,’ said mine host of the Candlestick, pushing his lantern-jawed visage and bare-boned nag rudely forward into the crowd—­’there is some news; and, if it please my Creator, I will forthwith obtain speirings thereof.’

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?’