 their pace, and to move with silence and precaution,
as they would soon be in presence of the enemy.
 

                               Chapter Fourteenth

 Quantum in nobis, we've thought good
 To save the expense of Christian blood,
 And try if we by mediation
 Of treaty, and accommodation.
 Can end the quarrel, and compose
 This bloody duel without blows.
                                                                         Butler.
 
The increased pace of the party of horsemen soon took away from their zealous
captives the breath, if not the inclination necessary for holding forth. They
had now for more than a mile got free of the woodlands, whose broken glades had,
for some time, accompanied them after they had left the woods of Tillietudlem. A
few birches and oaks still feathered the narrow ravines, or occupied in
dwarf-clusters the hollow plains of the moor. But these were gradually
disappearing; and a wide and waste country lay before them, swelling into bare
hills or dark heath, intersected by deep gullies; being the passages by which
torrents forced their course in winter, and during summer the disproportioned
channels for diminutive rivulets that winded their puny way among heaps of
stones and gravel, the effects and tokens of their winter fury; - like so many
spendthrifts dwindled down by the consequences of former excesses and
extravagance. This desolate region seemed to extend farther than the eye could
reach, without grandeur, without even the dignity of mountain wildness, yet
striking, from the huge proportion which it seemed to bear to such more favoured
spots of the country as were adapted to cultivation, and fitted for the support
of man; and thereby impressing irresistibly the mind of the spectator with a
sense of the omnipotence of Nature, and the comparative inefficacy of the
boasted means of amelioration which man is capable of opposing to the
disadvantages of climate and soil.
    It is a remarkable effect of such extensive wastes, that they impose an idea
of solitude even upon those who travel through them in considerable numbers; so
much is the imagination affected by the disproportion between the desert around
and the party who are traversing it. Thus the members of a caravan of a thousand
souls may feel, in the deserts of Africa or Arabia, a sense of loneliness
unknown to the individual traveller whose solitary course is through a thriving
and cultivated country.
    It was not, therefore, without a peculiar feeling of emotion, that Morton
beheld, at the distance of about half-a-mile, the body of the cavalry to which
his escort belonged, creeping up a steep and winding path which ascended from
the more level moor into the hills. Their numbers, which appeared formidable
when they crowded through narrow roads,
