gether
and in hand, here and there handfuls of recruits. But no flood of
loyally-shouting gentry, no bearers of great names drawing the sword
for King James III and a gallant, youthful Regent! Each dawn said they
will come! Each eve said they have not come! One month from leaving
Edinburgh found this army of Highland chiefs and their clans, Lowland
Scots, a few Englishmen, a few Irishmen, and a few Frenchmen, led by
skilful enough generals and by a Prince the great-grandson of Charles
I, deep in England, but little advanced in bulk for all that. Old
cavalier England stayed upon its acres. Other times, other manners!
And how to know when an old vortex begins to disintegrate and a mode
of action becomes antiquated, belated?

Wade was to one side with his army, and now there loomed ahead the
Duke of Cumberland and ten thousand English troops. Battle seemed
imminent, yet again the Scots force pushed by. The 4th of December
found this strange wedge, of no great mass, but of a tested,
rapier-like keenness and hardness, at the town of Derby, with London
not a hundred and thirty miles away. And still no English rising for
the rightful King! Instead Whig armies, and a slow Whiggish buzzing
beginning through all the country.

The Duke of Cumberland and Marshal Wade, two jaws opening for Jacobite
destruction, had between them twenty thousand men. Spies brought
report of thirty thousand drawn up before London, on Finchley Common.
The Prince might have so many lions of the desert in his Highlanders,
but multitude will make a net that lions cannot break. At Derby also
they had news from that Scotland now so dangerously far behind them.
Royal Scots had landed from France, the Irish brigade from the same
country was on the seas, and French regiments besides. Lord John
Drummond had in Scotland now at least three thousand men and good
promise of more. The Prince held council with the Duke of Perth, Lord
George Murray, Lord Nairn, the many chiefs and leading voices. Return
to Scotland, make with these newly gathered troops and with others a
greater army, expect aid from France, stand in a gained kingdom the
onslaught from Hanoverian England? Or go on--go on toward London?
Encounter, defeat, with half his number, the Duke of Cumberland's ten
thousand, keep Wade from closing in behind them, meet the Finchley
Common thousands, come to the enemy's capital of half a million souls?
Return where there were friends? Go on where false-promising