Almost all the cantering gentlemen had cast up.
One cross-road meet being so much like another, it will not be worth while describing the one at Dallington Burn.

The reader will have the kindness to imagine a couple of roads crossing an open common, with an armless sign-post on one side, and a rubble-stone bridge, with several of the coping-stones lying in the shallow stream below, on the other.
The country round about, if any country could have been seen, would have shown wild, open, and cheerless.

Here a patch of wood, there a patch of heath, but its general aspect bare and unfruitful.

The commanding outline of Beechwood Forest was not visible for the weather.

Time now, let us suppose, half-past ten, with a full muster of horsemen and a fog making unwonted dulness of the scene--the old sign-pole being the most conspicuous object of the whole.
Hark! what a clamour there is about it.