It was swept and decorated, with boughs of various kinds, like the house of a Jewess upon what is termed the Feast of the Tabernacles.

The produce of the milk of her little flock was prepared in as great variety of forms as her skill admitted, to entertain her son and his associates whom she, expected to receive along with him.
But the principal decoration, which she sought with the greatest toil, was the cloud-berry, a scarlet fruit, which is only found on very high hills; and these only in small quantities.

Her husband, or perhaps one of his forefathers, had chosen this as the emblem of his family, because it seemed at once to imply, by its scarcity, the smallness of their clan, and, by the places in which it was found, the ambitious height of their pretensions.
For the time that these simple preparations of welcome endured, Elspat was in a state of troubled happiness.

In fact, her only anxiety was that she might be able to complete all that she could do to welcome Hamish and the friends who she supposed must have attached themselves to his band, before they should arrive and find her unprovided for their reception.
But when such efforts as she could make had been accomplished, she once more had nothing left to engage her save the trifling care of her goats; and when these had been attended to, she had only to review her little preparations, renew such as were of a transitory nature, replace decayed branches and fading boughs, and then to sit down at her cottage-door and watch the road as it ascended on the one side from the banks of the Awe, and on the other wound round the heights of the mountain, with such a degree of accommodation to hill and level as the plan of the military engineer permitted.

While so occupied, her imagination, anticipating the future from recollections of the past, formed out of the morning mist or the evening cloud the wild forms of an advancing band, which were then called "Sidier Dhu" (dark soldiers), dressed in their native tartan, and so named to distinguish them from the scarlet ranks of the British army.
In this occupation she spent many hours of each morning and evening..