ur, and the spirit of good fellowship that
were characteristic, along with some less admirable qualities, of the
old Borderers. The rage, tempered with a dash of Scots caution, of the
Bauld Buccleuch when he heard that his unruly countryman had been taken
'against the truce of border tide' by the 'fause Sakelde and the keen
Lord Scroope'; his device for a rescue that while it would set the
Kinmont free, would 'neither harm English lad nor lass,' or break the
peace between the countries; the keen questionings and adroit replies
that passed, like thrust and parry, between the divided bands of the
warden's men and Sakelde himself, who met them successively as they
crossed the Debateable Land, until it came to the turn of tongue-tied
Dickie o' Dryhope, who, having never a word ready, 'thrust the lance
through his fause bodie,'--all these are told in the most vigorous and
graphic style of rough first-hand narrative. And then the story-teller
takes up the parable in his own person, and describes how he and his
comrades plunged through the flooded Eden, climbed the bank, and through
'wind and weet and fire and sleet' came beneath the castle wall:--

'We crept on knees and held our breath,
Till we placed the ladders against the wa';
And sae ready was Buccleuch himsel'
To mount the first before us a'.

He 's ta'en the watchman by the throat,
And flung him down upon the lead--
"Had there not been peace between our lands,
Upon the other side thou 'dst gaed!"'

In the 'inner prison' lay Willie o' Kinmont, like a wolf in a trap,
sleeping soft and waking oft, with thoughts of the gallows, on which he
was to swing in the morning, and of his wife and bairns and the 'gude
fellows' in the Debateable Land he was never to see again. But in an
instant, at the hail and sight of his friends, the fearless humour of
the Border rider comes back to him; mounted, irons and all, on the
shoulders of Red Rowan, 'the starkest man in Teviotdale,' he must first
take farewell of his host, Lord Scroope, with a significant promise
that he would 'pay him lodging maill when first they met on the border
side.'

'Then shoulder high, with shout and cry,
We bore him down the ladder lang;
At every stride Red Rowan made
I wot the Kinmont's airns played clang.

"O mony a time," quo' Kinmont Willie,
"I 've ridden a horse baith wild and wud;
But a rougher beast than Red Rowan
I