name. The
four grenadiers moved to the front accordingly. The officer commanded the
rest of the party to be ready to support them, and only saying to us,
"Look to your safety, gentlemen," gave, in rapid succession, the word to
the grenadiers--"Open your pouches--handle your grenades--blow your
matches--fall on."

The whole advanced with a shout, headed by Captain Thornton,--the
grenadiers preparing to throw their grenades among the bushes where the
ambuscade lay, and the musketeers to support them by an instant and close
assault. Dougal, forgotten in the scuffle, wisely crept into the thicket
which overhung that part of the road where we had first halted, which he
ascended with the activity of a wild cat. I followed his example,
instinctively recollecting that the fire of the Highlanders would sweep
the open track. I clambered until out of breath; for a continued
spattering fire, in which every shot was multiplied by a thousand echoes,
the hissing of the kindled fusees of the grenades, and the successive
explosion of those missiles, mingled with the huzzas of the soldiers, and
the yells and cries of their Highland antagonists, formed a contrast
which added--I do not shame to own it--wings to my desire to reach a
place of safety. The difficulties of the ascent soon increased so much,
that I despaired of reaching Dougal, who seemed to swing himself from
rock to rock, and stump to stump, with the facility of a squirrel, and I
turned down my eyes to see what had become of my other companions. Both
were brought to a very awkward standstill.

The Bailie, to whom I suppose fear had given a temporary share of
agility, had ascended about twenty feet from the path, when his foot
slipping, as he straddled from one huge fragment of rock to another, he
would have slumbered with his father the deacon, whose acts and words he
was so fond of quoting, but for a projecting branch of a ragged thorn,
which, catching hold of the skirts of his riding-coat, supported him in
mid-air, where he dangled not unlike to the sign of the Golden Fleece
over the door of a mercer in the Trongate of his native city.

As for Andrew Fairservice, he had advanced with better success, until he
had attained the top of a bare cliff, which, rising above the wood,
exposed him, at least in his own opinion, to all the dangers of the
neighbouring skirmish, while, at the same time, it was of such a
precipitous and impracticable nature, that he dared neither to advan