e record in "cattle duffing" of
Australia and Western America). In the Scottish Border in the days of
our not very remote forefathers, to take toll of the Southron's herds
was esteemed almost more a virtue than a vice, and though times had
changed, even so recently as a couple of centuries back it may have
seemed to some no very great crime to misappropriate a neighbour's
sheep. March dykes or boundary fences were then things unknown; the
"sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high hill."
What, therefore, so natural as that the flocks should in time draw
together and blend; what so easy for a man, dishonestly inclined, as to
alter his neighbour's brand and ear-mark, hurry off to some distant
market, and there sell a score or two of sheep to which he had no title?
The penalty on conviction, no doubt, was heavy--at the least, in
Scotland, flogging at the hands of the common hangman, or banishment to
the Plantations; but more commonly death. The fear of punishment,
however, has never yet put an end to any particular form of crime, and
here detection was improbable if the thief were but clever. He might be
aided, too, by a clever dog, for "some will hund their dowg whar they
darna gang themsel'," and a really clever dog may be taught almost
anything short of speaking.

In the year 1762 men's minds, in the upper reaches of the Tweed, began
to be sore perplexed by an unaccountable leakage in the numbers of their
sheep. Normal losses did not greatly disturb them; to a certain
percentage of loss from the "loupin' ill," from snowstorm, from chilly
wet weather during lambing, they were resigned. But the losses that now
disquieted them were quite abnormal. It was not as if the sheep were
perishing on the hillside; then at least their skins would have been
brought in, and the element of mystery would not have agitated the minds
of owners. But here were sheep constantly vanishing in large numbers
without leaving even a trace of themselves. Something must be very far
wrong somewhere. They were angry men, the Peeblesshire hill farmers,
that summer of 1762, angry and sore puzzled, for up Manor Water and the
Leithen, by Glensax Burn and the Quair, and over the hills into
Selkirkshire, the tale was ever the same, sheep gone, and never a trace
of them to be found.

In Newby was a tenant, William Gibson, whose losses had been
particularly severe, and, not unnaturally, Gibson was in a very
irritable frame of mind; so up