Twice I threw the reins across my left arm, and twice cocked and levelled my carbine, for on each occasion figures seemed to enter the pass, some on horseback and others on foot; but the next moment showed them to be only fashioned by my overheated fancy, out of the long weeds and nettles that waved to and fro on the night wind between me and the faint moonlight beyond. On each of these occasions I made a narrow escape; to have fired my carbine would have drawn the whole line of pickets to the front, and brought the entire army under arms; but then to give a _false_ alarm is a crime to be punished, though not quite so severely as to omit an alarm when necessary; so my position was sufficiently perplexing. Silence, night, and loneliness induced reverie, and from the present and from the future, memory carried me back to the past--that period which possessed so little that was bright for me. But a few months before, how little could I have imagined, or anticipated, that I should become a soldier and be situated as I was then--a lonely sentinel amid the mountains of Brittany! I thought with some growing repugnance of war, its cruelties and stern necessities--the precipitate execution of the two unfortunate spies, and the mangled corpses of the slain seamen, whom I had seen flung like lumber from the lower deck ports of the _Success_, after she engaged the battery in the Bay of Cancalle, and a shudder came over me, for I was young to such work as this. I thought of the green mountains of my native land--that lovely Borderland, and its chain of hills that rise from sea to sea, between the sister kingdoms, with their fertile glens where herd and hirsel grazed in peace; where the brown eagle had his eyry in the grey rocks, and the black raven soared high in mid-air or came swooping down when the silvery salmon, or the spotted trout leaped up from the plashing linn--the land where every cairn and wood, tower and tree, had some wild or warlike legend of the past. Old Netherwood, too, with the lazy rooks that cawed among its oaks, or roosted on the creaking vanes of its time-worn turrets. Then I turned away my thoughts in anger to the secluded Border village, where I had been so long a drudge, yea a very slave; but with the memory of old Nathan's inky desk, came a pleasant vision of the pretty little Ruth--Ruth whom I had well-nigh forgotten. Was Ruth unmarried still? Did she ever think of me? I could almost laugh at my first love already, for to this heresy will the mind come at times, and in barracks I had reached it already.