ween my legs have ne'er bestrode."'

Then comes the wild rush for the Eden, where it flowed from bank to
brim, with all Carlisle streaming behind in chase, and the bold plunge
of the fugitives into the spate, leaving Lord Scroope staring after
them, sore astonished, from the water's edge:

'"He 's either himsel' a devil frae hell,
Or else his mither a witch maun be;
I wadna' have ridden that wan water
For a' the gowd in Christentie."'

History attests the main incidents and characters of _Kinmont Willie_ as
true to the facts; and tradition has broidered the story with incidents
which the ballad itself does not record. The daughter of the smith, on
the road between Longtown and Langholm, used to relate, half a century
afterwards, how Buccleuch impatiently thrust his spear through the
window to arouse her father and rid Armstrong's legs from their
'cumbrous spurs,' and remembered seeing the rough riders grouped in the
outer darkness and streaming with wet. The rescue was one of the latest
of the episodes of Border warfare before the Union of the Crowns; and
Armstrong of Kinmont himself, besides being a typical specimen of his
clan,

'Able men,
Somewhat unruly, and very ill to tame,'

was one of the last of what we may describe as the legitimate line of
Border freebooters, before the freebooter became merged in the vulgar
thief, as explained quaintly and sympathetically in Scott of Satchells'
rhyme:

'It 's most clear a freebooter doth live in hazard's train;
A freebooter 's a cavalier who ventures life for gain;
But since King James the Sixth to England went,
There has been no cause for grief;
And he that hath transgressed since then,
Is no cavalier, but a thief.'

No doubt many other like exploits of capture and rescue were enacted and
recounted on the Borders in the troublous times. _Jock o' the Side_ and
_Archie o' Ca'field_ read almost like variants of _Kinmont Willie_.
Their heroes, too, are 'notour lymours and thieves,' living on or near
the margin of the Debateable Land; and he of the Side, in particular,
lives in Sir Richard Maitland's bede-roll of the Liddesdale thieves, as
only 'too well kend' by his peaceable neighbours,

'A greater thief did never hyde;
He never tyris
For to brek byris,
Owre muir and myris,
Owre gude and guide.'

Both are clapped into 'prison strang,' and liberated by a night raid and
sur