were engaged in very lively discourse, apparently delighted with each other, and the kind host was pressing a third bottle of Burgundy, when the sound of a drum was heard at some distance.  The Major, who, in the glee of an old soldier, had forgot the duties of a magistrate, cursed, with a muttered military oath, the circumstances which recalled him to his official functions.  He rose and went towards the window, which commanded a very near view of the highroad, and he was followed by his guests.

The drum advanced, beating no measured martial tune, but a kind of rub-a-dub-dub, like that with which the fire-drum startles the slumbering artizans of a Scotch burgh.  It is the object of this history to do justice to all men; I must therefore record, in justice to the drummer, that he protested he could beat any known march or point of war known in the British army, and had accordingly commenced with ‘Dumbarton’s Drums,’ when he was silenced by Gifted Gilfillan, the commander of the party, who refused to permit his followers to move to this profane, and even, as he said, persecutive tune, and commanded the drummer to beat the 119th Psalm.  As this was beyond the capacity of the drubber of sheepskin, he was fain to have recourse to the inoffensive row-de-dow as a harmless substitute for the sacred music which his instrument or skill were unable to achieve.  This may be held a trifling anecdote, but the drummer in question was no less than town-drummer of Anderton.  I remember his successor in office, a member of that enlightened body, the British Convention.  Be his memory, therefore, treated with due respect.

CHAPTER XXXV

A VOLUNTEER SIXTY YEARS SINCE

On hearing the unwelcome sound of the drum, Major Melville hastily opened a sashed door and stepped out upon a sort of terrace which divided his house from the highroad from which the martial music proceeded.  Waverley and his new friend followed him, though probably he would have dispensed with their attendance.  They soon recognised in solemn march, first, the performer upon the drum; secondly, a large flag of four compartments, on which were inscribed the words, covenant, kirk, king, kingdoms. The person who was honoured with this charge was followed by the commander of the party, a thin, dark, rigid-looking man, about sixty years old.  The spiritual pride, which in mine host of the Candlestick mantled in a sort of supercilious hypocrisy, was in this man’s face elevated and yet darkened by genuine and undoubting fanaticism.  It was impossible to behold him without imagination placing him in some strange crisis, where religious zeal was the ruling principle.  A martyr at the stake, a soldier in the field, a lonely and banished wanderer consoled by the intensity and supposed purity of his faith under every earthly privation, perhaps a persecuting inquisitor, as terrific in power