Although the cold was intense, and the legs of the Highlanders were as red as their jackets, the sun was shining brightly, and the whole surface of the earth and the atmosphere were sparkling and glittering in his radiance. With their musquets slung and a piper playing before them, the light company trod merrily up the ascent, many of them singing aloud to the notes of the pipe and the tramp of their feet, which sounded dull and hollow on the hard and frozen path. A captain of the 34th regiment, whom with his company they relieved, left Stuart a flask of brandy, for which he and his two subs (Chisholm and Evan Macpherson) were very thankful, and they found it a considerable acquisition during a winter day and night in a log-house, where the wind went in and out at a hundred chinks and crannies. The picquet-house was internally one large apartment, in the centre of which the soldiers piled their arms, and huddled close together on the ground for mutual heat, and to avoid the cold blast which blew through the numerous open loop-holes in the four walls of the edifice. Towards night, a soldier of the 66th regiment, muffled up in his grey great-coat, came toiling up the steep ascent from the valley below, bringing to Stuart a letter, which had arrived from Lisbon in the packet for his corps. An officer of the 66th, who was intimate with Ronald, had despatched it to him forthwith, and he knew in an instant, by the hand-writing and the crest on the seal, that it came from Alice Lisle. Giving the Englishman a glass of brandy, he desired him to lose no time in regaining his quarters, in case of a snow-storm setting in before nightfall. If any thing would serve to buoy up one’s spirits amid all the miseries of campaigning and the dangers of daily warfare, such letters as those of Alice Lisle certainly must have had that effect. After expressing her delight for Stuart’s success and safety in a manner and delicacy of style peculiarly her own, she continued thus:—