g.

Buccleuch has turn'd to Eden Water,
Even where it flow'd frae brim to brim,
And he has plunged in wi' a' his band,
And safely swam them through the stream.

He turned them on the other side,
And at Lord Scroope his glove flung he--
'If ye like na' my visit in merry England,
In fair Scotland come visit me!'

All sore astonished stood Lord Scroope,
He stood as still as rock of stane;
He scarcely dare to trew his eyes,
When through the water they had gane.

'He is either himsel' a devil frae hell,
Or else his mother a witch maun be;
I wadna' have ridden that wan water
For a' the gowd in Christentie.'"

At a place called "Dick's Tree," not far from Longtown, there still
stands the "smiddy" where lived the blacksmith who had the honour of
knocking off Kinmont Willie's fetters. Sir Walter Scott has handed on
the story of the smith's daughter who, as a little child, was roused at
daybreak by a "sair clatter" of horses, and shouts for her father,
followed, as the smith slept soundly, by a lance being thrust through
the window. Looking out in the dim grey of the morning, the child saw
"more gentlemen than she had ever seen before in one place, all on
horseback, in armour, and dripping wet--and that Kinmont Willie, who sat
woman-fashion behind one of them, was the biggest carle she ever
saw--and there was much merriment in the party."

Furious was the hive of wasps that Buccleuch brought about his head by
thus insultingly casting a stone into the English bike. The wrath of
Queen Elizabeth was unappeasable. Scrope found it sounded better to
multiply the number of the raiders by five, but Scottish tongues were
not slow to tell the affronting truth, and the Englishmen of Carlisle
had the extra bitterness of being butts for the none too subtle jests of
every Scot on the Border. The success of so daring a venture made the
Scottish reivers arrogant. Between June 19 and July 24 of that year, the
spoils of the western Marches were a thousand and sixty-one cattle and
ninety-eight horses, and some thirty steadings and other buildings,
mostly in Gilsland, were burned. The angry English made reprisals. It
was in one of them that the Scots who were taken were leashed "like
doggis," and for this degradation Buccleuch and Ker of Cessford made the
English pay most handsomely. Together those "twoo fyrebrandes of the
Border" led an incursion into Tynedal