 only occurring in
ancient times, and spoke of it coolly, as one very likely to recur. He felt at
once the impulse of curiosity, and that slight sense of danger which only serves
to heighten its interest. He might have said with Malvolio, »I do not now fool
myself, to let imagination jade me! I am actually in the land of military and
romantic adventures, and it only remains to be seen what will be my own share in
them.«
    The whole circumstances now detailed concerning the state of the country,
seemed equally novel and extraordinary. He had indeed often heard of Highland
thieves, but had no idea of the systematic mode in which their depredations were
conducted; and that the practice was connived at, and even encouraged by, many
of the Highland chieftains, who not only found the creaghs, or forays, useful
for the purpose of training individuals of their clan to the practice of arms,
but also of maintaining a wholesome terror among their Lowland neighbours, and
levying, as we have seen, a tribute from them, under colour of protection-money.
    Bailie Macwheeble, who soon afterwards entered, expatiated still more at
length upon the same topic. This honest gentleman's conversation was so formed
upon his professional practice, that Davie Gellatley once said his discourse was
like »a charge of horning.« He assured our hero, that »from the maist ancient
times of record, the lawless thieves, limmers, and broken men of the Highlands,
had been in fellowship together by reason of their surnames, for the committing
of divers thefts, reifs, and herships upon the honest men of the Low Country,
when they not only intromitted with their whole goods and gear, corn, cattle,
horse, nolt, sheep, outsight and insight plenishing, at their wicked pleasure,
but moreover made prisoners, ransomed them, or concussed them into giving
borrows (pledges) to enter into captivity again: all which was directly
prohibited in divers parts of the Statute Book, both by the act one thousand
five hundred and sixty-seven, and various others; the whilk statutes, with all
that had followed and might follow thereupon, were shamefully broken and
vilipended by the said sorners, limmers, and broken men, associated into
fellowships, for the aforesaid purposes of theft, stouthreef, fire-raising,
murther, raptus mulierum, or forcible abduction of women, and such like as
aforesaid.«
    It seemed like a dream to Waverley that these deeds of violence should be
familiar to men's minds, and currently talked of, as falling within the common
order
