peace on the Borders
is a man's part; and only men mingle in it. Both sides are too
accustomed to surprises, and have too many strong fortalices and friends
at hand, to give the foe the chance of 'lifting' whole families as well
as their gear and cattle. The last thing one looks for, then, in the
moss-trooping ballads is a strain of tender and pathetic sentiment. The
tone is hearty and virile even to boisterousness. The minstrel, like the
fighters, revels in hard knocks and rough jests. He has ridden with them
probably, and has had the piper's share of the plunder and whatever else
was going. He has heard 'the bows that bauldly ring and the arrows
whiddering near him by,' as he passes through the 'derke Foreste.' He
took the fell with the other folk in the following of the Scottish
warden, and looking down the slope towards Reed Water, witnessed the
beginning and end of the skirmish known as _The Raid of the Reidswire_.

'Be this our folk had taen the fell
And planted pallions there to bide;
We looked down the other side,
And saw them breasting ower the brae
Wi' Sir John Forster as their guide,
Full fifteen hundred men and mae.'

With strokes, graphic and humorous, he describes how the meeting of the
two wardens, 'begun with merriment and mowes,' turned to the exchange of
such 'reasons rude' between Tyndale and Jed Forest, as flights of arrows
and 'dunts full dour.' Pride was at the bottom of the mischief; pride
and the memory of old scores.

'To deal with proud men is but pain;
For either must ye fight or flee,
Or else no answer make again,
But play the beast and let them be.'

And so, when the English raised the question of surrendering a fugitive,

'Carmichael bade them speak out plainlie,
And cloak no cause for ill or good;
The other answering him as vainly,
Began to reckon kin and blood;
He raise, and raxed him where he stood,
And bade him match him wi' his marrows;
Then Tyndale heard these reason rude,
And they let off a flight of arrows.'

Again, in _Kinmont Willie_, the flower, with one exception to be named,
of the ballads that celebrate the exploits of the 'ruggers and rivers,'
the singer lets slip, as it were by accident, that he was of the bold
and lawless company that broke Carlisle Castell in time of peace. The
old lay tingles and glows with the restless untameable courage, the
dramatic fire, the grim humo