ast of milk,
eggs, barley-bread, fresh butter, and honey-comb. The poor girl had
already made a circuit of four miles that morning in search of the eggs,
of the meal which baked her cakes, and of the other materials of the
breakfast, being all delicacies which she had to beg or borrow from
distant cottagers. The followers of Donald Bean Lean used little food
except the flesh of the animals which they drove away from the Lowlands;
bread itself was a delicacy seldom thought of, because hard to be
obtained, and all the domestic accommodations of milk, poultry, butter,
etc., were out of the question in this Scythian camp. Yet it must not be
omitted that, although Alice had occupied a part of the morning in
providing those accommodations for her guest which the cavern did not
afford, she had secured time also to arrange her own person in her best
trim. Her finery was very simple. A short russet-coloured jacket and a
petticoat of scanty longitude was her whole dress; but these were clean,
and neatly arranged. A piece of scarlet embroidered cloth, called the
snood, confined her hair, which fell over it in a profusion of rich dark
curls. The scarlet plaid, which formed part of her dress, was laid aside,
that it might not impede her activity in attending the stranger. I should
forget Alice's proudest ornament were I to omit mentioning a pair of gold
ear-rings and a golden rosary, which her father (for she was the
daughter of Donald Bean Lean) had brought from France, the plunder,
probably, of some battle or storm.

Her form, though rather large for her years, was very well proportioned,
and her demeanour had a natural and rustic grace, with nothing of the
sheepishness of an ordinary peasant. The smiles, displaying a row of
teeth of exquisite whiteness, and the laughing eyes, with which, in dumb
show, she gave Waverley that morning greeting which she wanted English
words to express, might have been interpreted by a coxcomb, or perhaps by
a young soldier who, without being such, was conscious of a handsome
person, as meant to convey more than the courtesy of an hostess. Nor do I
take it upon me to say that the little wild mountaineer would have
welcomed any staid old gentleman advanced in life, the Baron of
Bradwardine, for example, with the cheerful pains which she bestowed upon
Edward's accommodation. She seemed eager to place him by the meal which
she had so sedulously arranged, and to which she now added a few bunches
of cranb