WAVERLEY PROCEEDS ON HIS JOURNEY Then Edward had collected his scattered recollection, he was surprised to observe the cavern totally deserted.

Having arisen and put his dress in some order, he looked more accurately round him; but all was still solitary.

If it had not been for the decayed brands of the fire, now sunk into grey ashes, and the remnants of the festival, consisting of bones half burnt and half gnawed, and an empty keg or two, there remained no traces of Donald and his band.

When Waverley sallied forth to the entrance of the cave, he perceived that the point of rock, on which remained the marks of last night's beacon, was accessible by a small path, either natural, or roughly hewn in the rock, along the little inlet of water which ran a few yards up into the cavern, where, as in a wet-dock, the skiff which brought him there the night before was still lying moored.

When he reached the small projecting platform on which the beacon had been established, he would have believed his further progress by land impossible, only that it was scarce probable but that the inhabitants of the cavern had some mode of issuing from it otherwise than by the lake.