Sheathed in brilliant armour, magnificently inlaid with gold, having his visor closed, a sword in his right hand and a poniard in his left, which also grasped a light rondelle or buckler, the tall and stately Count of Carlstein, wearing above his gorget the Golden Fleece and the White Eagle, led the forlorn hope.
"Victoria! Victoria!" we heard him crying. "Forward, forward! swords and pikemen!"
"Sancta Maria!" replied his soldiers, in a thousand varying tones uniting in one roar; "Sancta Maria! Vivat--vivat!" and that wild cry of the Austrians was echoed by the wilder hurrah of a regiment of Croats, who had leaped from their white horses, and were levelling their long carbines at us, point-blank over their saddles, with deadly precision. As the foe approached I looked at Ian. With his eyes flashing under the peak of his helmet, and both hands clenched on the hilt of his claymore, he was surveying the scene below with stern calmness. Phadrig Mhor, with a Lochaber axe, stood by his side, and the M'Farquars, with their empty muskets clubbed, stood grimly in their ranks. They were a dark, a savage, and picturesque group.
"You see, my cousin," said Ian, in that grim jesting tone which he could assume at times; "that King Christian has resolved we shall pay dearly for declining the Danish cross. We shall all find our graves by the shore of the Elbe."
"Ye say truth, M'Farquhar," said Dunbar, as he pressed to the front with a partisan in his hand, and a pair of pistols in his belt; "but if ever we have a Hegisippus to relate our story, he shall never, like a lying loon, have it to say that we feared the face of man. But that king, whose life was saved by the Scottish Rittmaster Hume, on the day he fled from the battle of Lütter, should have remembered that trifling circumstance; and also that his sister had the honour to be queen of fair Scotland. But bide ye--hark!"
Above the uproar in the trench below us, the fire of the Croatian calivers, and the shouts of the stormers, we heard the clang of a horse's hoofs on a paved street, and saw a cavalier lightly armed, galloping in mad haste across the bridge of the Elbe, and in three seconds he dashed into the heart of the sconce amongst us.