der standing still as a statue; the former
panting and expanding his broad nostrils to the morning wind, the latter
motionless, with his eye fixed on the first beams of the rising sun,
which already began to peer above the eastern horizon and gild the
distant mountains of Cumberland and Liddesdale.

He seemed in a reverie, from which he started at my approach, and,
putting his horse in motion, led the way at a leisurely pace through a
broken and sandy road, which traversed a waste, level, and uncultivated
tract of downs, intermixed with morass, much like that in the
neighbourhood of my quarters at Shepherd's Bush. Indeed, the whole open
ground of this district, where it approaches the sea, has, except in a
few favoured spots, the same uniform and dreary character.

Advancing about a hundred yards from the brink of the glen, we gained
a still more extensive command of this desolate prospect, which seemed
even more dreary, as contrasted with the opposite shores of Cumberland,
crossed and intersected by ten thousand lines of trees growing in
hedgerows, shaded with groves and woods of considerable extent, animated
by hamlets and villas, from which thin clouds of smoke already gave sign
of human life and human industry.

My conductor had extended his arm, and was pointing the road to
Shepherd's Bush, when the step of a horse was heard approaching us. He
looked sharply round, and having observed who was approaching, proceeded
in his instructions to me, planting himself at the same time in the very
middle of the path, which, at the place where we halted, had a slough on
the one side and a sandbank on the other.

I observed that the rider who approached us slackened his horse's pace
from a slow trot to a walk, as if desirous to suffer us to proceed, or
at least to avoid passing us at a spot where the difficulty of doing so
must have brought us very close to each other. You know my old failing,
Alan, and that I am always willing to attend to anything in preference
to the individual who has for the time possession of the conversation.

Agreeably to this amiable propensity, I was internally speculating
concerning the cause of the rider keeping aloof from us, when my
companion, elevating his deep voice so suddenly and so sternly as at
once to recall my wandering thoughts, exclaimed, 'In the name of the
devil, young man, do you think that others have no better use for their
time than you have, that you oblige me to repeat the sa