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Though late the hour Beltane sat wakeful, chin on fist, beside a glimmering watch-fire, oft turning his glance towards the massy, weather-beaten tower, bethinking him of the noble lady Abbess, of her strange looks and words, and so fell to brooding thought.

There, mindful of the injunction of the kind-hearted villager, they were about to turn to the left and take a short cut across the fields, but on coming to a road, bordered with a row of poplars on either side they beheld directly in their path the watch-fire of a Prussian detachment.

Close by this low wall the Highlander guided Waverley, and, in order probably to make him sensible of his danger, or perhaps to obtain the full credit of his own dexterity, he intimated to him, by sign and example, that he might raise his head so as to peep into the sheepfold. Waverley did so, and beheld an outpost of four or five soldiers lying by their watch-fire.

"It makes my flesh creep." "Yes; I was going to say it's time you lads changed your conversation," said the doctor quietly, "for none of the forest creatures are likely to disturb us to-night with a watch-fire kept up like this."

The gale fiercely swept the plain, in its loud wailings and its roar drowning every human sound. The rain, all the night long, poured down in torrents. But through the darkness and the storm, and breasting the gale, the contending hosts, without even a watch-fire to cheer the gloom, waited anxiously for the morning.

With pardonable exaggeration the Emperor afterwards wrote to Clarke: "If I had then had 30,000 rounds, I should to-day be the master of the world." At nightfall, the chief returned weary and depressed to the windmill, and instructed Berthier to order the retreat. Then, beside a watch-fire, he sank down on a bench into a deep slumber, while his generals looked on in mournful silence.

Close by this low wall the Highlander guided Waverley, and, in order probably to make him sensible of his danger, or perhaps to obtain the full credit of his own dexterity, he intimated to him, by sign and example, that he might raise his head so as to peep into the sheep-fold. Waverley did so, and beheld an outpost of four or five soldiers lying by their watch-fire.

If Goethe had been stolen away a child, and reared in a robber horde in the depths of a German forest, do you think the world would have had "Faust" and "Iphegenie?" But he would have been Goethe still stronger, wiser than his fellows. At night, round their watch-fire, he would have chanted wild songs of rapine and murder, till the dark faces about him were moved and trembled.

"That is a Carlist watch-fire, Senorita," answered the officer briskly, and no one seemed to notice his slip of the tongue except Sarrion, who glanced at him and then decided not to remind him that the title no longer applied to Juanita. In a few moments the bishop joined them, and they all made their way down the winding path.

Instantly, as if by magic, the entire circuit of the corral, which up to this moment had been kept in profound darkness, blazed with thousands of lights, every hunter on the instant that the elephants entered, rushing forward to the stockade with a torch kindled at the nearest watch-fire.