"I wish he'd flogged him into precision on a staircase," said the Colonel. "Damme, I am hungry." "I'm thinking there'll be a dub of water in the bottom yonder," said the chieftain, "and Mistress Waynflete shall, if she will, take her first meal Highland fashion." As I firmly declined to be carried another yard, the Highlanders unmade my litter and resumed their plaids. In the trough of the valley we found a streamlet of clear sweet water, and our repast consisted of a handful of oatmeal, of which every clansman carried a supply in a linen bag, stirred in a horn of water. It was not our Staffordshire notion of a breakfast, but it was better than nothing. "Water-brose is a guid enough thing at a pinch," said Maclachlan to Margaret, "guid enough to take a big loon like yon Donald to London and back." Donald, it appeared, liked an addition to it, notwithstanding his chief's praise of it, for he was taking a long pull from a leather bottle. This, he explained, was usquebaugh, "ta watter of life," and the spice of poetry in the description tempted the Colonel and me to try a dram. The Colonel probably had had worse drink in his time, but even he made no comment. I would almost as lief have had a blank charge fired into my mouth. While we all took our brose, and Maclachlan squired Margaret, the Colonel told me how it had happened that the Highlanders chanced to come to our rescue in the very nick of time. My own trouble is to get my tale straight and simple, and I have no intention of making a hard task harder by trying to interweave with the threads of my own story a poor history of these important days. Mr. Volunteer Ray saw much more of these things than ever I did, and the curious reader may turn to his fat, little, brown volume for particulars. He was on the other side, and is too partial for a perfect historiographer, but the account of things is there, and reasonably well done too. But as what happened to Margaret, the Colonel, and me, happened because of the campaign of the rival armies, I must boil down what the Colonel told me if I am to make my tale clear. The Colonel, to his credit, as I think, was so enthusiastic over all matters military that he was rather long-winded in his account, and, in like fashion with our housewifely Kate, it behoves me, so to speak, to make a jar of jelly out of a pan of fruit, which is easier done with crab-apples than words.