rope's forests--the gigantic and indomitable Urus. A coat of mail,
composed of bright steel rings interwoven in the Gaulish fashion, covered
his body from the throat downward to the hips, leaving his strong arms
bare to the shoulder, though they were decorated with so many chains,
bracelets, and armlets, and broad rings of gold and silver, as would have
gone far to protect them from a sword cut.

His legs were clothed, unlike those of any southern people, in
tightly-sitting pantaloons--_braccae_, as they were called--of gaily
variegated tartans, precisely similar to the trews of the Scottish
Highlander--a much more ancient part of the costume, by the way, than the
kilt, or short petticoat, now generally worn--and these trews, as well as
the streaming plaid, which he wore belted gracefully about his shoulders,
shone resplendent with checkers of the brightest scarlet, azure, and
emerald, and white, interspersed here and there with lines and squares of
darker colors, giving relief and harmony to the general effect.

A belt of leather, studded with bosses and knobs of coral and polished
mountain pebbles, girded his waist, and supported a large purse of some
rich fur, with a formidable dirk at the right side, and, at the left,
suspended by gilt chains from the girdle, a long, straight, cutting
broadsword, with a basket hilt--the genuine claymore, or great sword--to
resist the sweep of which Marcellus had been fain, nearly five hundred
years before, to double the strength of the Roman casque, and to add a
fresh layer of wrought iron to the tough fabric of the Roman buckler.

This ponderous blade constituted, with the dagger, the whole of his
offensive armature; but there was slung on his left shoulder a small round
targe, of the hide of the mountain bull, bound at the rim, and studded
massively with bronze, and having a steel pike projecting from the
centre--in all respects the same instrument as that with which the clans
received the British bayonet at Preston Pans and Falkirk.

The charger of this gallantly-attired chief was bedecked, like his rider,
with all the martial trappings of the day; his bridle, mounted with bits
of ponderous Spanish fabric, was covered with bosses gemmed with amber and
unwrought coral; his housings, of variegated plaid, were elaborately
fringed with embroideries of gold; and his rich scarlet poitrel was
decked, in the true taste of the western savage, with tufts of human hair,
every tuft indicat