In pursuance of his usurping commission, the earl is now marching rapidly toward the Lothians, in the hope of intercepting you in your progress.
"Thanks to the constant information you send us of your movements, for being able to surprise you of this danger! I should have attempted to have checked the Southron, by annoying his flanks, had not his numbers rendered such an enterprise on my part hopeless.

But his aim being to come up with you, if you meet him in the van, we shall have him in the rear; and, so surrounded, he must be cut to pieces.

Surely the tree you planted in Dumbarton, is not now to be blasted! "Ever your general's and Scotland's true servant, "Eustace Maxwell." "What answer ?" inquired Ker.
Wallace hastily engraved with his dagger's point upon his gauntlet, "Reviresco!** Our sun is above!" and desiring it to be given to the messenger to carry to Sir Eustace Maxwell, he refixed himself in his saddle, and spurred over the Carron.
**Reviresco! means "I bud again!" This encouraging word is now the reuto of the Maxwell arms.
The moon was near her meridian as the wearied troops halted on the deep shadows of the Carse of Stirling.

All around them was desolation; the sword and the fire had been there, not in open declared warfare, but under the darkness of midnight, and impelled by rapacity and wantonness; hence from the base of the rock, even to the foot of the Clackmannan Hills, all lay a smoking wilderness.
An hour's rest was sufficient to restore every exhausted power to the limbs of the determined followers of Wallace; and, as the morning dawned, the sentinels on the ramparts of the town were not only surprised to see a host below, but that (by the most indefatigable labor, and a silence like death) had not merely passed the ditch, but having gained the counterscarp, had fixed their movable towers, and were at that instant overlooking the highest bastions.

The mangonels and petraries, and other implements for battering walls, and the ballista, with every efficient means of throwing missive weapons, were ready to discharge their artillery upon the heads of the beseiged.
At a sight so unexpected, which seemed to have arisen out of the earth like an exhalation (with such muteness and expedition had the Scottish operations been carried on), the Southrons, struck with dread, fled a moment from the walls; but immediately recovering their presence of mind, they returned, and discharged a cloud of arrows upon their assailants.