t of their art was the highest to which the
Borderers aspired; and there never was a riever among them all that
excelled in it so much as Christie's Will. "To steal a stirk, or wear a
score o' sheep _hamewards_," he used to say, "was naething; but to steal
a _lord_ was the highest flicht o' a man's genius, and ought never to be
lippened to a hand less than an Armstrong's;" and, certainly, if the
success with which he executed one scheme of that high kind will
guarantee Will's boasted abilities, he did not transcend the truth in
limiting lord-stealing to the Armstrongs.

Will married a distant relation of the true Border breed, named Margaret
Elliot--a lass whose ideas of hussyskep were so peculiar, that she
thought Gilnockie and its laird were going to ruin when she saw in the
kail-pot a "heugh bane" of their _own_ cattle, a symptom of waste,
extravagance, and laziness, on the part of her husband, that boded less
good than the offer made by "the Laird's Jock," (Johnny Armstrong's
henchman,) to give "Dick o' the Cow" a piece of his own ox, which he
came to ask reparation for, and, not having got it, tied with St. Mary's
knot (hamstringed) thirty good horses. To this good housewife, in fact,
might be traced, if antiquaries would renounce for it less important
investigations, the old saying, that stolen joys (qu. queys?) are
sweetest, undoubtedly a Border aphorism, and now received into the
society of legitimate moral sayings. When lazy and not inclined for
"felonie," Will would not subscribe to the truth of the dictum, and
often got for grace to the dinner he had not taken from the English, and
yet relished, the wish of the good dame, that, for his want of spirit,
it might choke him. That effect, however, was more likely to be produced
by the beef got in the regular Border way; for the laws were beginning
now to be more vigorously executed, and many a riever was astonished and
offended by the proceedings of the Justice-Ayr at Jedburgh, where they
were actually going the length of _hanging_ for the crime of _conveying_
cattle from one property to another.

It was in vain that Will told his wife these proceedings of the Jedburgh
court; she knew very well that many of the Armstrongs, and the famous
Johnny among the rest, had been strung up, by the command of their king,
for rebellion against his authority; but it was out of all question,
beyond the reach of common sense, and, indeed, utterly barbarous and
unjust to hang a m