lt I could drag myself but little farther; pretty soon, I
must lie down and die on these wet mountains like a sheep or a fox, and
my bones must whiten there like the bones of a beast. My head was light,
perhaps; but I began to love the prospect, I began to glory in the
thought of such a death, alone in the desert, with the wild eagles
besieging my last moments. Alan would repent then, I thought; he would
remember, when I was dead, how much he owed me, and the remembrance
would be torture. So I went like a sick, silly, and bad-hearted
schoolboy, feeding my anger against a fellow-man, when I would have been
better on my knees, crying on God for mercy. And at each of Alan's
taunts I hugged myself. "Ah!" thinks I to myself, "I have a better taunt
in readiness; when I lie down and die, you will feel it like a buffet in
your face; ah, what a revenge! ah, how you will regret your ingratitude
and cruelty!"

All the while, I was growing worse and worse. Once I had fallen, my legs
simply doubling under me, and this had struck Alan for the moment; but I
was afoot so briskly, and set off again with such a natural manner, that
he soon forgot the incident. Flushes of heat went over me, and then
spasms of shuddering. The stitch in my side was hardly bearable. At last
I began to feel that I could trail myself no farther: and with that,
there came on me all at once the wish to have it out with Alan, let my
anger blaze, and be done with my life in a more sudden manner. He had
just called me "Whig." I stopped.

"Mr. Stewart," said I, in a voice that quivered like a fiddle-string,
"you are older than I am, and should know your manners. Do you think it
either very wise or very witty to cast my politics in my teeth? I
thought, where folk differed, it was the part of gentlemen to differ
civilly; and if I did not, I may tell you I could find a better taunt
than some of yours."

Alan had stopped opposite to me, his hat cocked, his hands in his
breeches pockets, his head a little on one side. He listened, smiling
evilly, as I could see by the starlight; and when I had done he began to
whistle a Jacobite air. It was the air made in mockery of General Cope's
defeat at Prestonpans:--

"Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye waukin' yet?
And are your drums a-beatin' yet?"

And it came in my mind that Alan, on the day of that battle, had been
engaged upon the royal side.

"Why do ye take that air, Mr. Stewart?" said I. "Is that to remind me
you have