dorned with diamonds, so my memory is haunted by a solemn
remembrance of a woman of more than female height, dressed in a long red
cloak, who commenced acquaintance by giving me an apple, but whom,
nevertheless, I looked on with as much awe as the future Doctor, High
Church and Tory as he was doomed to be, could look upon the Queen. I
conceive this woman to have been Madge Gordon, of whom an impressive
account is given in the same article in which her mother Jean is
mentioned, but not by the present writer:--

'The late Madge Gordon was at this time accounted the Queen of the
Yetholm clans. She was, we believe, a granddaughter of the celebrated
Jean Gordon, and was said to have much resembled her in appearance. The
following account of her is extracted from the letter of a friend, who
for many years enjoyed frequent and favourable opportunities of observing
the characteristic peculiarities of the Yetholm tribes:--"Madge Gordon
was descended from the Faas by the mother's side, and was married to a
Young. She was a remarkable personage--of a very commanding presence and
high stature, being nearly six feet high. She had a large aquiline nose,
penetrating eyes, even in her old age, bushy hair, that hung around her
shoulders from beneath a gipsy bonnet of straw, a short cloak of a
peculiar fashion, and a long staff nearly as tall as herself. I remember
her well; every week she paid my father a visit for her awmous when I was
a little boy, and I looked upon Madge with no common degree of awe and
terror. When she spoke vehemently (for she made loud complaints) she used
to strike her staff upon the floor and throw herself into an attitude
which it was impossible to regard with indifference. She used to say that
she could bring from the remotest parts of the island friends to revenge
her quarrel while she sat motionless in her cottage; and she frequently
boasted that there was a time when she was of still more considerable
importance, for there were at her wedding fifty saddled asses, and
unsaddled asses without number. If Jean Gordon was the prototype of the
CHARACTER of Meg Merrilies, I imagine Madge must have sat to the unknown
author as the representative of her PERSON."'[Footnote: Blackwood's
Magazine, vol. I, p. 56.]

How far Blackwood's ingenious correspondent was right, how far mistaken,
in his conjecture the reader has been informed.

To pass to a character of a very different description, Dominie
Sampson,--the reader