CHAPTER XV.
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 of 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.