We rose before the sun: it was a sharp, purple morning, as if the cold air had given Aurora the complexion of a dairy-maid abroad too early. In so far, to me, it was not disagreeable, for the toil of walking in the woods has ever been great to my loose, shuffling feet; and the clambering over prostrate trees and cradle-heaps, with my brief legs, is always warm work. The behaviour of John Waft was not, however, satisfactory; he walked a little off on the one side from Robin and me, and was not, it seemed, in a conversable humour. But I was resolved not to have my trouble for nothing, so I began to jeer him for taking us a gowk's errand, and to make light of the mare's nest he was conducting us to see. He, however, took no heed of what I said, but plodded on straight-forward with his compass in his hand, so that, what with his sullen silence, and the rising wind, and the rough, untrodden road, our morning's journey was not much calculated to soften the austerity of my reflections. In short, before we had been out two hours, during which we did not travel quite four miles, I was growing testy and fretful: but for plain shame, I would have returned.

When we had come to the sixth mile blaize, a boundary mark on a pine, we halted to take some refreshment, near a fine spring that came hopping and leaping, as it were with gladness, out of a rock. This was in a part of the forest where I had never been, and it was a place that seemed to have been made on purpose for travellers to rest at. Here we tarried some time; and the bailie being, for so long, relieved of his care in tracing the road, resumed his wonted pleasing looks and quaint pawkrie, by which he, in a great measure, restored my comfort. The day, however, was evidently overcast; the thickly interwoven basketing of the arborous vaults above us, prevented the sky from being seen; but we knew by the deepened gloom around, and by seeing no shadows among the boughs, that the sun was obscured.