The troop of twenty men, who assembled near a gate of the King's Wark, and from thence set forth under the guidance of the two nobles, the Laird of Blackcastle and their new ally, Hew Borthwick, in their aspect and appearance did full justice to that character for ease and flexibility of conscience ascribed to them by Lord Home. They were all strong, dark, and sinewy men, whose forms were hardened into mere bone and brawn, and were durable as iron; for they were lawless mosstroopers, Scottish Bedouins, in fact; men who won every meal at the spear's point, and lived in their harness; men whose dwellings were among wild morasses, pathless woods, and inaccessible mountains; where law was never known, and religion little heard of; wild and predatory warriors, who fought against their countrymen as readily as against the common enemy that dwelt beyond the frontier; for, like the Ishmaelities, their hands were upraised against all men. Their armour, which consisted of a splinted jack with plate sleeves and steel gloves, head-piece and gourgerin, was all rusty and well dinted by many a sword-cut and lance-thrust. Their beards and whiskers flowed out between their steel cheek-plates, ample and uncombed as the shaggy manes of their strong and active border steeds. Well-armed and fleetly-mounted, Home and Hailes, divested of every distinguishing badge, rode together at their head. Wheeling off the main street between the hedge-rows of the Cotefield-loan, the whole party crossed the green and sandy links, and entered on the vast and purple expanse of the Figgate-muir, which was covered by the mossy stumps of an old druidical forest, whose roots are yet turned up by the plough and spade. Shrill blew the wind, and drearily boomed the waves upon their left. The estuary of the Forth looked black as ink, and its billows rolled in white foam upon the lonely beach with a deep and hollow sound. The slanting aspect of the clouds showed that the rain, which had been pouring all that morning in torrents, was again about to descend; and though the party rode fast to escape it, they had only reached the little Chapel of Saint Mary Magdalene, which stood among some coppice near a stream that poured through a ravine into the sea, when it descended with such fury as almost to blind even the border riders, and the wind blew as if it would have blown its last, driving the sand from the shore across the open moor, and forcing the horsemen to seek shelter in the grove, while the two lords dismounted and entered the chapel, the door of which stood open, and before the altar of which they made the usual involuntary genuflection, by half-kneeling and signing the cross; and this, with them, was a very useless piece of mummery.