Grisell Home was Lady Grisell Baillie when, in 1703, her mother died.

"Where is Grisell," she asked, almost with her latest breath. And when Lady Grisell came and held her hand the old lady said, "My dear Grisell, blessed be you above all, for a helpful child you have been to me."

Lady Grisell Baillie lived through the '15 and the '45, and those who suffered in the first of those years had the kindest of friends and helpers in her large-minded husband and in herself. She was eighty at the time of the '45, but during that year and during the next, when her death took place, she helped by every means in her power those who had suffered from fighting for a cause that was dear to their hearts. She always remembered what she herself had gone through. "Full of years, and of good works," as her somewhat pompous epitaph has it, Lady Grisell Baillie died in December 1746, and was buried at Mellerstain on the day upon which she should have celebrated her eighty-second birthday. And surely the angels who, on that first Christmas Eve, long, long ago, sang of "Peace on earth—goodwill towards men," must have been very near when she, who was a Christmas baby, and whose whole long life had been one of love and of peace, of goodwill and of charity to others, was laid in the earth as the snowflakes fell, on Christmas Day, one hundred and sixty-eight years ago.



KINMONT WILLIE

A venerable and highly respected Scottish professor of literature was once asked what was his ruling passion—his heart's desire? If the secrets of his soul could be laid bare, what, above all, would be found to be his predominant wish? The question was an indiscreet one, but he was tolerant. He tightly compressed his gentle mouth, and firmly readjusted his gold-rimmed glasses.

"I wish" said he, "to be a corsair."

It would have been interesting to know how many of a following he would have had from sedate academic circles had he been given his heart's desire and had sailed down the Clyde with the raw head and bloody bones showing on the black flag that flew at his mast-head. How many of us are there with whom law-abiding habits, decorous respectability, form but a thin covering of ice over unplumbed depths of lawless desire? Not long since, when a wretched criminal case in which the disappearance of a pearl necklace was involved, was agitating every Scottish club and tea-table, a charming old Scottish lady, whose career from childhood up has been one of unblemished virtue, was heard to bemoan the manner of commission of the crime. "She did it very stupidly. Now, if I had been doing it I should"—And her astounded auditors listened to an able exposition of the way in which she would successfully have eluded justice. Is it the story of the villain who is successfully tracked to his doom that attracts us most? or that of the great Raffles and his kind whose villainies almost invariably escape detection, and who burgles with a light and easy touch and the grace and humour of a Claude Duval? Let us be honest with ourselves. How many of us really wish to be corsairs? Which of us would not have been a reiver in the old reiving days? Have we not noticed in ourselves and other Borderers an undeniable complacency, a boastful pride in a mask of apology that would not deceive an infant, when we say, "Oh yes; certainly a good many of my ancestors were hanged for lifting cattle." And, however "indifferent honest" we ourselves may be, which of us does not lay aside even that most futile mask and boast unashamedly when we can claim descent from one of those princes among reivers—Wat o' Harden, Johnnie Armstrong, or Kinmont Willie?

William Armstrong, better known as Kinmont Willie, lived in the palmiest days of the Border reivers. The times of purely Scottish and purely English kings were drawing to a close, and with one monarch to rule over Britain the raider could no longer plead that he was a patriot who fought for king and country when he made an incursion over the Cheviots, burned a few barns and dwelling-houses, lifted some "kye and oxen," horses, and goats, and what household gear and minted money he could lay hands on, slew a man or two, and joyously returned home.

But with Elizabeth still on the English throne, and with Queen Mary, and afterwards her son, reigning in Scotland, the dance could go merrily on, and when we look at those days in retrospect it seems to us that the last bars of the music, the last turns in the dance, went more rapidly than any that had gone before.

In Kinmont Willie's lifetime the Wardens of the Marches had but little leisure. It was necessary for them to be fighting men with a good head for figures, for on the days of truce when the Wardens of the Scottish and English Marches met to redd up accounts, not only had they to work out knotty arithmetical problems with regard to the value of every sort of live stock, of buildings, of "insight," and the payment of such bills, but they had to have expert knowledge in fair exchange of a Scottish for an English life, an English for a Scotch. Little wonder if their patience sometimes ran short, as did that of a Howard of Naworth upon one famous occasion. He was deeply engrossed in studies that had no bearing upon Border affairs when an officer came to announce the capture of some Scottish moss-troopers, and to ask for the Warden's commands with regard to them. The interruption was untimely, and Lord Howard was exasperated. "Hang them, in the devil's name!" he said angrily, and went on with his studies. A little later he felt he could better give his mind to the consideration of the case, and sent for his officer. "Touching the prisoners," said he, "what have you done with them?"

Proud of being one of those who did not let the grass grow beneath their feet, the officer beamingly responded: "Everyone o' them's hangit, my lord!"

It was a March day in 1596, when a Wardens' meeting took place at Dayholm, near Kershopefoot. The snow was still lying in the hollows of the Cheviots, the trees were bare, the Liddel and the Esk swollen by thaws and winter rains; but weather was a thing that came but little into the reckoning of the men of the Marches unless some foray was afoot. They got through the business more or less satisfactorily, and proceeded to ride home before the day of truce should be ended. From sunrise on the one day until sunset on the next, so the Border law ordained, all Scots and Englishmen who were present at the Wardens' meeting should be free of scathe. Now the Warden of Liddesdale at that time was Sir Walter Scott of Branxholme, laird of Buccleuch. He was one of the greatest men of his century; a "fyrebrande," according to Queen Elizabeth, and a fierce enemy according to those who incurred his enmity; but, according to all others, a man of perfect courage, stainless loyalty and honour, charming wit, and great culture. He never spared an enemy nor turned his back on a friend, and he was a born winner of hearts and leader of men. Amongst his retainers was Kinmont Willie, and as Willie rode from the Wardens' meeting, along the banks of the Liddel, in company with only three or four men, a body of two hundred English horsemen, commanded by Salkeld, Warden of the Eastern March, marked him from across the water. Truce or no truce, the chance seemed to them one that was too good to lose. Speedily some of them pushed on ahead, and an ambush was laid for Kinmont Willie. He and his friends were naturally totally unprepared for such a dastardly attack, but it took them but little time to gather their wits, and Willie gave them a good run for their money. For nearly four miles they chased him, but ran him down at length. After some hard giving and taking, he had to acknowledge his defeat, and, pinioned like a common malefactor—arms tied behind him, legs bound under his horse's belly—they rode with him into Carlisle town.

The news of the treacherous taking of his follower was not long in reaching Buccleuch, who at once raised an angry protest. Scrope, the English Warden, received this with an evasive and obviously trumped-up counter-charge of Kinmont Will having first broken truce. Moreover, he said, he was a notorious enemy to law and order, and must bear the penalty of his misdeeds. This was more than the bold Buccleuch could stomach.

"He has ta'en the table wi' his hand, He garr'd the red wine spring on hie— 'Now Christ's curse on my head,' he said, 'But avenged of Lord Scrope I'll be! O, is my basnet a widow's curch? Or my lance a wand o' the willow-tree? Or my arm a ladye's lilye hand, That an English lord should lightly me?'"

No time was lost in making an appeal to King James, which resulted in an application to the English Government. But while the English authorities quibbled, paltered, and delayed—with a little evasion, a little extra red-tapism, a little judicious procrastination—the days of Kinmont Willie were being numbered by his captors. The triumph of putting an end to the daring deeds of so bold a Scottish reiver when they had him safely in chains in Carlisle Castle, was one that they were not likely lightly to forego. It would be indeed a merry crowd of English Borderers that flocked to Haribee Hill on the day that Will of Kinmont dangled from the gallows.

Buccleuch saw that he had no time to lose. He himself must strike at once, and strike with all his might.

The night of April 13, 1596, was dark and stormy. All the Border burns and rivers were in spate; the winds blew shrewd and chill through the glens of Liddesdale, and sleet drifted down in the teeth of the gale. The trees that grew so thick round Woodhouselee bent and cracked, and sent extra drenching showers of rain down on the steel jacks of a band of horsemen who carefully picked their way underneath them, on to the south. Buccleuch was leader, and with him rode some forty picked men of his friends and kinsmen, to meet some hundred and fifty or so of other chosen men. Scotts, Elliots, Armstrongs, and Grahams were there, and although Buccleuch had requested that only younger sons were to risk their lives in the forlorn hope that night, Auld Wat o' Harden and many another landowner rode with their chief. "Valiant men, they would not bide," says Scott of Satchells, whose own father was one of the number. Kinmont Willie's own tower of Morton, on the water of Sark, about ten miles north of Carlisle, was their rallying point. Buccleuch had arranged every detail most carefully at a horse-race held at Langholm a few days before, and one of the Grahams, an Englishman whose countrymen were not yet aware that the Graham clan had allied themselves to that of the Scotts, had conveyed his ring to Kinmont Willie to show him that he was not forgotten by his feudal lord. One and all, the reivers were well armed, "with spur on heel, and splent on spauld," and with them they carried scaling ladders, picks, axes, and iron crowbars. The Esk and Eden were in furious flood, but no force of nature or of man could stay the reivers' horses that night.

"We go to catch a rank reiver Has broken faith wi' the bauld Buccleuch."

That was the burden of their thoughts, and although they well knew that ere the dawning each one of them might be claiming the hospitality of six feet of English sod, their hearts were light. To them a message that the fray was up was like the sound of the huntsman's horn in the ears of a thoroughbred hunter.

"'Where are ye gaun, ye mason lads, Wi' a' your ladders, lang and hie?' 'We gang to berry a corbie's nest, That wons not far frae Woodhouselee.'"

No light matter was it to harry that corbie's nest. Carlisle Castle was a strong castle, strongly garrisoned, and to make a raid on an English town was a bold attempt indeed. But fear was a thing unknown to the Border reivers, and the flower of them rode with Buccleuch that night—close on his horse's heels Wat o' Harden, Walter Scott of Goldielands, and Kinmont's own four stalwart sons—Jock, Francie, Geordie, and Sandy. As the dark night hours wore on, sleet and wind were reinforced by a thunderstorm.

"And when we left the Staneshaw-bank, The wind began full loud to blaw, But 'twas wind and weet, and fire and sleet, When we came beneath the castle wa'."

When the besiegers reached the castle they found some of the watch asleep, and the rest sheltering indoors from the storm. The outside of the castle was left to take care of itself. It was dismaying to find the scaling ladders too short to be of any use, but a small postern gate was speedily and quietly undermined. Drifting sleet, growling thunder, and the wails of the wind drowned all sounds of the assault, and soon there was no further need for concealment, for the lower court of the castle was theirs. The guard started up, to find sword-blades at their throats; two of them were left dead, and the rest were speedily overpowered. Buccleuch, the fifth man in, gave the command to proclaim aloud their triumph:

"'Now sound out trumpets!' quoth Buccleuch; 'Let's waken Lord Scroope right merrilie!' Then loud the Warden's trumpet blew— 'O wha daur meddle wi' me?'"

While Buccleuch himself kept watch at the postern, two dozen stout moss-troopers now rushed to the castle gaol, a hundred yards from the postern gate, forced the door of Kinmont Willie's prison, and found him there chained to the wall, and carried him out, fetters and all, on the back of "the starkest man in Teviotdale."

"Stand to it!" cried Buccleuch—so says the traitor, a man from the English side, who afterwards acted as informer to the English Warden—"for I have vowed to God and my Prince that I would fetch out of England, Kinmont, dead or alive."

Shouts of victory in strident Scottish voices, the crash of picks on shattered doors and ruined mason-work, and that arrogant, insolent, oft-repeated blast from the trumpet of him whom Scrope described in his report to the Privy Council as "the capten of this proud attempt," were not reassuring sounds to the Warden of the English Marches, his deputy, and his garrison. Five hundred Scots at least—so did Scrope swear to himself and others—were certainly there, and there was no gainsaying the adage that "Discretion is the better part of valour." So, in the words of the historian, he and the others "did keip thamselffis close."

But no sooner had the rescue party reached the banks of the Eden than the bells of Carlisle clanged forth a wild alarm. Red-tongued flames from the beacon on the great tower did their best, in spite of storm and sleet, to warn all honest English folk that a huge army of Scots was on the war-path, and that the gallows on Haribee Hill had been insulted by the abduction of its lawful prey.

"We scarce had won the Staneshaw-bank, When a' the Carlisle bells were rung, And a thousand men on horse and foot, Cam' wi' the keen Lord Scroope along.

Buccleuch has turn'd to Eden Water, Even where it flow'd frae brim to brim, And he has plunged in wi' a' his band, And safely swam them through the stream.

He turned them on the other side, And at Lord Scroope his glove flung he— 'If ye like na' my visit in merry England, In fair Scotland come visit me!'

All sore astonished stood Lord Scroope, He stood as still as rock of stane; He scarcely dare to trew his eyes, When through the water they had gane.

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

At a place called "Dick's Tree," not far from Longtown, there still stands the "smiddy" where lived the blacksmith who had the honour of knocking off Kinmont Willie's fetters. Sir Walter Scott has handed on the story of the smith's daughter who, as a little child, was roused at daybreak by a "sair clatter" of horses, and shouts for her father, followed, as the smith slept soundly, by a lance being thrust through the window. Looking out in the dim grey of the morning, the child saw "more gentlemen than she had ever seen before in one place, all on horseback, in armour, and dripping wet—and that Kinmont Willie, who sat woman-fashion behind one of them, was the biggest carle she ever saw—and there was much merriment in the party."

Furious was the hive of wasps that Buccleuch brought about his head by thus insultingly casting a stone into the English bike. The wrath of Queen Elizabeth was unappeasable. Scrope found it sounded better to multiply the number of the raiders by five, but Scottish tongues were not slow to tell the affronting truth, and the Englishmen of Carlisle had the extra bitterness of being butts for the none too subtle jests of every Scot on the Border. The success of so daring a venture made the Scottish reivers arrogant. Between June 19 and July 24 of that year, the spoils of the western Marches were a thousand and sixty-one cattle and ninety-eight horses, and some thirty steadings and other buildings, mostly in Gilsland, were burned. The angry English made reprisals. It was in one of them that the Scots who were taken were leashed "like doggis," and for this degradation Buccleuch and Ker of Cessford made the English pay most handsomely. Together those "twoo fyrebrandes of the Border" led an incursion into Tynedale, where, in broad daylight, they burned three hundred steadings and dwelling-houses, many stables, barns, and other outhouses, slew with the sword fourteen of those who had been in the Scottish raid, and brought back a handsome booty.

King Jamie was in a most uncomfortable position. Queen Elizabeth demanded Buccleuch's punishment, and he argued. She nagged, and he wriggled. Finally, after continual angry remonstrances from the insulted English monarch, he had to give in, and Buccleuch and Ker had both, at different periods, to suffer imprisonment for the sin, in the virgin Queen's eyes, of the rescue of Kinmont Willie, and of its bloody consequences. We realise what was the reputation of Buccleuch and of his followers when we see into what a state of panic the mere prospect of having the Border chieftain as prisoner at Berwick-on-Tweed threw Sir John Carey, the governor. To Lord Hunsdon he wrote: "I entreat your Lordship that I may not become the jailor of so dangerous a prisoner or, at least, that I may know whether I shall keep him like a prisoner or no? for there is not a worse or more dangerous place in England to keep him than this; it is so near his friends, and, besides, so many in this town willing to pleasure him, and his escape may be so easily made; and once out of this town he is past recovery. Wherefore I humbly beseech your honor, let him be removed from hence to a more secure place, for I protest to the Almightie God, before I will take the charge to kepe him here, I will desire to be put in prison myself, and to have a keeper of me. For what care soever be had of him here, he shall want no furtherance whatsoever wit of man can devise, if he himself list to make an escape. So I pray your Lordship, even for God's sake and for the love of a brother, to relieve me from this danger." But there was no attempt at a rescue of Buccleuch. He did not desire it. Not as a criminal, but as a state prisoner he gave himself up to the English governor, and, having given his parole, he kept it, like the gentleman of stainless honour that he was.

Two years after his imprisonment at Berwick-on-Tweed, Buccleuch, on his way with two hundred followers to serve with Prince Maurice of Nassau in the Low Countries—a raid from which many a Borderer never returned—was sufficiently received into favour to be permitted to go to London and kiss the hand of her most gracious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. The remembrance of Kinmont Willie still rankled in that most unforgiving of royal breasts.

"How dared you," she imperiously demanded, "undertake an enterprise so desperate and presumptuous?"

"Dared?" answered Buccleuch; "what is it that a man dares not do?"

Elizabeth turned impetuously to a lord-in-waiting. "With ten thousand such men," she said, "our brother of Scotland might shake the firmest throne in Europe."

That Kinmont Willie avenged himself not once, but many times, on those who had treacherously trapped him and done their best to make him meat for the greedy English gibbet, is not a matter of surmise, but one of history. His ride into Carlisle on that bleak March day, and the long days and dreary nights he spent in chains in the English gaol, were little likely to engender a gentle and forgiving spirit in the breast of one of the most fiery of the "minions of the moon." When, in 1600, he raided Scrope's tenants, they were given good cause to regret the happenings in which Scrope had taken so prominent a part.

We have no record of the end of Kinmont Willie, and can but hope, for his sake, that he died the death he would have died—a good horse under him almost to the end, a good sword in his hand, open sky above him, and round him the caller breeze that has blown across the Border hills. In a lonely little graveyard in the Debatable Land, close to the Water of Sark, and near the March dyke between the two countries, his body is said to rest. Does there never come a night, when the moon is hidden behind a dark scud of clouds, and the old reiver, growing restless in his grave, finds somewhere the shade of a horse that, in its day, could gallop with the best, and rides again across the Border, to meet once more his "auld enemies" of England, and, to the joyous accompaniment of the lowing of cattle and the jingle of spurs, returns to his lodging as the first cock crows, and grey morning breaks?

"O, they rade in the rain, in the days that are gane, In the rain and the wind and the lave; They shoutit in the ha' and they routit on the hill, But they're a' quaitit noo in the grave."



IN THE DAYS OF THE '15

Close on two hundred years back from the present time there stood far up the South Tyne, beyond Haltwhistle, on the road—then little better than a bridle-track—running over the Cumberland border by Brampton, an inn which in those days was a house of no little importance in that wild and remote country.

If its old walls could speak, what, for instance, might they not have told of Jacobite plottings? Beneath its roof was held many a meeting of the supporters of the King "over the water," James the Eighth; and here, riding up from Dilston, not seldom came the unfortunate Earl of Derwentwater, to take part in the Jacobite deliberations. The young lord and the horse he usually rode were figures familiar and welcome to the country folk around, and at the inn they were as well known as was the landlord himself. It was not long after a secret meeting held here in the earlier half of the year 1715 that the warrants were issued which led to Derwentwater's flight from Dilston, and precipitated the Rising that within a few months rolled so many gallant heads in the dust of the scaffold.

It might perhaps have been better for Lord Derwentwater had he been less beloved in Northumberland, and had his devoted admirers been unable to send him notice of the coming of the warrant for his arrest. He might not then have had opportunity to commit himself so deeply; and there might have been a romantic and pathetic figure the less in the doleful history of that unhappy period. As it was, he had time to get clear away, and was able to lie securely hid, partly in farmhouses, partly near Shaftoe Crags, till the news reached him that Forster had raised the standard of rebellion. On 6th October 1715, at the head of a little company of gentlemen and armed servants, he joined Forster at Greenrig.

A poor affair at the best, this muster in Northumberland; and though the county was seething with excitement, and a few notable men went out with the Earl, his personal following did not exceed seventy in all. Then followed the march which ended so disastrously in pitiful surrender at Preston that fatal November day. However gallant personally, Forster was an incapable soldier, no leader of men, and General Wills had but to spread wide his net to sweep in the bulk of the insurgents—Forster, Derwentwater, Kenmure, Nithsdale, Carwath, Wintoun, and men less exalted in rank by the score and the hundred. The bag was a heavy one, that day of disaster to the Stuart cause; and alas, for many of those who filled it! Alas, too, for the wives and the mothers who sat at home, waiting! Not to everyone was given the opportunity to dare all for husband or son; to few came such chance as was seized by the Countess of Nithsdale, who so contrived that her husband escaped from the Tower disguised in woman's clothing. It was boldly schemed, and success followed her attempt. Others could but pray to God and petition the King. She not only prayed, but acted. Would that there might have been one so to act for Derwentwater! More happy had it been, perhaps, for his Countess had she never uttered the taunt that ended his hesitation to join in the Rebellion: "It is not fitting that the Earl of Derwentwater should continue to hide his head in hovels from the light of day, when the gentry are up in arms for their lawful sovereign." They say that her spirit mourns yet within the tower of Dilston.

Away up the valley of the Tyne, amongst the wild Northumberland hills, news went with lagging gait, those leisurely days of the eighteenth century; even news of battle or of disaster did not speed as it is the wont of ill news to do: "For evil news rides fast, while good news baits." Tidings, in those good old days, but trickled through from ear to ear, slowly, as water filters through sand. Little news, therefore, of Lord Derwentwater, or of the Rising, was heard in or around Haltwhistle after the insurgent force left Brampton; no man knew for a certainty what fortune, good or bad, had waited on the fortunes of his friends.

Night was closing down on the desolate Border hills on a drear November evening of 1715. Throughout a melancholy day, clinging mist had blurred the outline of even the nearest hills; distance was blotted out. Thin rain fell chillingly and persistently, drip, dripping with monotonous plash from the old inn's thatched eaves; a light wind sobbed fitfully around the building, moaning at every chink and cranny of the ill-fitting window-frames. "A dismal night for any who must travel," thought the stableman of the inn, as he looked east and then west along the darkening road. No moving thing broke the monotony of the depressing outlook, and the groom turned to his work of bedding down for the night the few animals that happened to be in his charge. They were not many; most of those that so frequently of late had stood here were away with their owners, following the fortunes of the Earl of Derwentwater; business was dull at the inn. Well, let the weather be what it liked, at least the groom's work was over for the night, and he might go sit by the cheerful peat fire in the kitchen, and drink a health to the King—the rightful King, God bless him; and it was little harm, thought he, if he drank another to the Earl—whom might the Saints protect.

Even as he turned to go, in the dusk at the door, framed, as it were, in a picture, there appeared a horseman leading a tired horse, the reins loose over his arm. Though seen only in that half light, the outline of man and beast were familiar to the stableman. Both seemed far spent; the horse held low its head, and sweat stood caked and thick on neck and heaving flanks, and dripped off inside down by the hocks.

"Ye've ridden hard, sir," said the groom, bustling forward to take the horse.

The stranger said no word, but himself led the tired animal into an empty stall. Yet, as the groom remembered later, of the other horses in the stable, not one raised its head, or whinnied, or took any notice whatever as the new-comer entered.

The stableman turned to lift his lantern, and when, an instant later, he again faced about, he stared to find himself alone; the strange horseman was nowhere to be seen. And the horse in the stall? Him the groom knew well; there was no possibility of mistake; it was the well-known grey on which Lord Derwentwater had ridden away to cast in his lot with Forster.

"Mistress! Mistress!" he cried, hurrying into the house, "has his lordship come in? He's led his grey gelding into the stable the noo, and niver a word wad he say to me or he gaed oot. An' I'm feared a's no weel wi' him; he was lookin' sair fashed, an' kind o' white like."

"His lordship i' the inn? Guide us!" cried the landlady, snatching up a tallow dip and hurrying into the unlit guest-room.

"Ye hae gotten back, my lord? And is a' weel wi' your lordship? And—e-eh! what ails—?" she gasped, as a tall figure, seated in the great oak chair by the smouldering fire, turned on her a face wan and drawn, disfigured by bloody streaks across the cheek. Slowly, like a man in pain, or one wearied to the extreme of exhaustion, the seated figure rose, stood for a moment gazing at her, and then, ere the landlady could collect her scattered wits, it had vanished. Vanished, too, was the grey horse that the groom had seen brought into the stable; and, what was more, the bedding in the stall where the animal had stood was entirely undisturbed, and showed no trace of any beast having been there.

It was long that night ere anybody slept within the walls of the old inn, and broken was their sleep. None doubted but that the Earl was killed, or if not killed, at least soon to die; and the news of Preston, when it came, was to those faithful friends no news, only confirmation of their fears. None, after that, dared hope; they knew that he must die. And the 24th of February 1716 saw a countryside plunged in grief, for that day fell on the scaffold the head of one whom everybody loved, who was every man's friend, who never turned empty away those who went to him seeking help.

Blood-red were the northern lights that flashed and shimmered so wildly in the heavens that night, red as the blood that had soaked into the sawdust of a scaffold; never before in the memory of living man had aurora gleamed with hue so startling. But the sorrow in the hearts of his people passed not away like the fading of the northern lights. His memory lives still in Northumberland; still, when they see the gleam and flicker of the aurora, folk there call it "Lord Derwentwater's Light"; and even yet it is a tradition that dwellers by the stream which flows past Dilston were wont to tell how, on that fatal day, its waters ran red like blood.

When "a' was done that man could do, and a' was done in vain," there remained but to convey his headless body, if it might be, to the spot where his forebears lie at rest.

"Albeit that here in London Town, It is my fate to die, O, carry me to Northumberland, In my fathers' grave to lie."

The Earl's body had been buried at St. Giles-in-the-Fields, and of those who went to recover it and to bring it home, there was one famous in Northumberland story, Frank Stokoe of Chesterwood. A remarkable man was Stokoe, of enormous personal strength and of great height—in stature a veritable child of Anak—a man without fear, brave to recklessness, a good friend and a terrible enemy. Added to all this, he was an extraordinarily expert swordsman. He was a man, too, of much influence and acknowledged authority in the county—a useful man to have on the side of the King—one to whom the people listened, and to whom often an appeal for help was made in ticklish affairs.

There was, for instance, that affair of the feud between Lowes of Willimoteswick Castle and Leehall of Leehall, which kept a great part of Tynedale in hot water for so many years. Leehall appears to have been physically the better man; at any rate, on more than one occasion Lowes seems to have escaped from the clutches of his enemy solely by the superior speed of the horse he rode, or possibly he was a light, and his enemy a heavy, weight, which would make all the difference in a rousing gallop across deep ground or heathery hill. In any case, as a general rule, Lowes was more often the hunted than the hunter. Yet, to the followers of Lowes—there must always be two sides to a story—it was he, and not Leehall, who was the finer man, for, of an encounter between the pair near Bellingham, when Lowes' horse was killed by a sword-thrust directed at the rider's thigh, the old ballad says:

"Oh, had Leehall but been a man As he was never ne-an, He wad have stabbed the rider And letten the horse alean."

But perhaps the animosity here shown to Leehall comes more from one who was a lover of horses—as who in Northumberland is not?—than from a partisan of Lowes. However, the feud ran on, year in, year out, as is the custom of such things, and no doubt it might have been bequeathed from father to son, like a property under entail, had it not been for the intervention of Frank Stokoe. Lowes and Leehall, it seems, had met by chance near Sewing Shields, with the usual result. Only, upon this occasion, the former was possibly not on the back of an animal the superior in speed and stamina of the horse on which Leehall was mounted. At least, Lowes was captured.

But, having got him, his enemy did not proceed to cut him into gobbets, or even to "wipe the floor" with him. Something lingering and long was more to his taste; he would make Lowes "eat dirt." With every mark, therefore, of ignominy and contempt, he dragged his fallen foe home to Leehall, and there chained him near to the kitchen fire-place, leaving just such length of chain loose as would enable the prisoner to sit with the servants at meals. The position can scarcely have been altogether a pleasing one to the servants, to say nothing of the prisoner. Doubtless the former, or some of them, may have found a certain joy in baiting, and in further humiliating, a helpless man, their master's beaten enemy. Yet that pleasure, one would think, could scarcely atone for the constant presence among them of an uninvited guest—a guest, too, who had not much choice in the matter of personal cleanliness. However, trifles of that nature did not greatly embarrass folk in days innocent of sanitary science. As for Lowes, it must have been difficult so to act consistent with the maintenance of any shred of dignity, or of conciliatory cheerfulness. If, for example, the cook should happen of a morning to have got out of bed "wrong foot first," how often must the attentions of that domestic have taken the form of a pot or a pan, or other domestic utensil, flung at his head. Here, no soft answer would be likely to turn away wrath. On the spur of the moment, when a pot, or an iron spit, has caught one on elbow or shins, it might not be altogether easy to think promptly of the repartee likely to be the most conciliating. And he could not "make himself scarce." The situation was embarrassing.

Now, the law, in those breezy times, took small cognisance of such little freaks as this; the law, indeed, was pretty powerless up among those wild hills. It wanted some force stronger, or, at all events, some force less magnificently deliberate, than that of the law.

Frank Stokoe was that force. To him went the friends of Lowes; and next morning saw the peel tower of Leehall besieged. Frank demanded the surrender of Lowes, uninjured. Leehall retorted that he might take him—if he could. But Leehall had reckoned without his retainers; they dared not fight against Frank Stokoe. So they said. But was it not, in reality, a sort of incipient Strike? Did they, perhaps, being wearied of the somewhat tame sport of baiting him, think the opportunity a fitting one to get rid of their uninvited guest for good and all? In any case, before an hour had passed, Leehall found it convenient to hand Lowes over to Stokoe, who safely deposited him by his own fireside at Willimoteswick, and the feud was pursued no further.

Whether or not Leehall was content to have thus played second fiddle, one does not know. Perhaps it was his men who, a year or two later, paid a nocturnal visit to Stokoe's peel tower. Frank was roused from sleep one winter night by his daughter, who told her father that some one was attempting to force the outer door. Stokoe stole quietly downstairs, to find that some one outside was busy with the point of a knife trying gently to prise back the great oaken bolt which barred his door. A very little more, a few minutes longer of work, and the beam would have been slid back, the door would have been quietly opened, and the throats of all the occupants of the house might have been cut. Whispering to his daughter to stand behind the door, and softly to push back the bolt each time the attempt was made to prise it open, Frank snatched down, and loaded with slugs, his old musket. Then very quietly he let himself down through the trap-door into the cow-house, which in all, or nearly all, old peel towers formed the lower story of the building. Cautiously unclosing the door of the cow-house, which opened on the outer air close to the flight of stone steps leading up to the main door of the tower, he stepped out. There, plainly to be seen at top of the stair, were several men, busily employed in trying to gain an entrance.

"Ye bluidy scoundrels," roared Stokoe, "I'll knock a hole in some o' ye that the stars will shine through."

And with that he let drive at the nearest, the charge, at so close a range, literally "knocking a hole" in him. Like a startled covey of partridges the remaining robbers fled, not only without attempting reprisals, but without even waiting to use the steps as an aid to escape; they simply flew through the air to mother earth and made tracks towards safety, anywhere, out of the reach of Frank Stokoe's vengeance; which perhaps was the wisest thing they could have done, for Stokoe was the kind of man who in a case such as this would willingly have knocked a hole in each one of them. In those days people were not very squeamish, and Stokoe seems to have gone quietly back to bed without greatly troubling himself about the slain robber; but the man's friends must have stolen back during the night, for in a copse near by, in a shallow grave hastily scooped out of the frozen earth, the dead body was found next day.

It is almost needless to say that Frank Stokoe was of those who would be certain to concern themselves in an enterprise such as the Rising of 1715. His sympathies were entirely with the Stuart, and against the Hanoverian King. Moreover, though he owned his peel tower and the land surrounding it, he was yet, as regards other land, a tenant of the Earl of Derwentwater, as well as being a devoted admirer of that nobleman. Naturally, therefore, when the Earl took the field, Stokoe followed him; and had all been of his frame of mind, there had been no ignominious surrender at Preston. Whilst fighting was to be done, no man fought so hard, or with such thorough enjoyment, as Stokoe. "Surrender" was a part of the great game that he did not understand; he was not of the stuff that deals in "regrettable incidents." At Preston that day, when all was done, there stood King George's men on either side, as well as in his front; in his rear a high stone wall, even to a man less heavily handicapped than he by weight, an obstacle almost insurmountable. But his horse was good—Stokoe's horses had to be good—and it knew its master. Never hitherto had the pair refused any jump, and they were not like to begin now. With a rush and a scramble, and the clatter of four good feet against the stone coping, they were over; over and away, galloping hard for the North Countrie, the free wind whistling past their ears as they sped, Stokoe throwing up his arm and giving a mocking cheer as each ineffective volley of musketry from the troops spluttered behind him; and the great roan horse snatched at his bit, and snorted with excitement.

Yes, that part of it was worth living for, and the blood danced in the veins of horse and man while the chase lasted. But what of it when once more the hills of Northumberland were regained, when the great moors that lay grim and frowning under the dark November skies were again beneath his horse's feet? It was a different matter then, for the hue and cry was out, and the earths all stopped against this gallant fox. Chesterwood was closed to him, no friend dared openly give him shelter.

"He had fled, had got clear away to France," was the story they gave out. But Frank Stokoe all the time lay snug and safe in hiding, not so very far from his own peel tower. And he was one of those who, disguised—perhaps in his case not very effectually—ventured to London, intent on bringing back the body of their chief, that it might lie at rest in the grave where sleep the fathers of that noble race.

There, in London, Frank narrowly escaped being taken. As it chanced, at that time an Italian bravo was earning for himself an unsavoury notoriety by going about boastfully challenging all England to stand up before him to prove who was the better man. He would mark his man, pick a quarrel with him, and the result was always the same. The Italian's trick of fence was deadly, his wrist a wrist of steel. None yet had been able to stand long before him; not one had got inside his guard.

As he walked once near Leicester Field in the dusk of an evening, Stokoe's great figure caught the eye of this little Italian, in whose mind suddenly arose the irresistible longing to bring this huge bulk toppling to earth. That would be something not unworth boasting about—that he, a sort of eighteenth-century David, should slay this modern Goliath.

No one had ever been able to complain that it was difficult to pick a quarrel with Frank Stokoe. Not that he was quarrelsome—far otherwise; but never was he known to shrink from any combat that was pressed on him, and on this occasion the venomous little foreigner found him most ready to oblige. It wanted but a slight jostle, an Italian oath hissed out, a few words in broken English to the effect that big men were proverbially clumsy, and that bigness and courage were not always to be found united. Stokoe knew very well who his assailant was, knew his reputation, and the slender chance the ordinary swordsman might expect to have against this foreigner's devilish skill, but his weapon was unsheathed almost before the Italian had ceased to curse. Cautiously keeping a check on his habitual impetuosity, calling to his aid every ounce of the skill he possessed, and content meanwhile if he could evade the vicious thrusts of his enemy, Stokoe for a time kept the fiery little man well at bay. Irritated at length by the giant's coolness, and by finding him, perhaps, not quite so easy a conquest as he had anticipated, unable to draw him on to expose himself by attacking, the Italian for a moment lost patience. None other in England had given him so much trouble. It was time this farce ended; he would spit the giant now. Once, twice, thrice—it was with the utmost difficulty that Stokoe saved himself from being run through the body, and once the sword of his enemy went through his clothes, grazing his ribs, and sending a warm stream trickling down his side. Then, suddenly, again the Italian lunged. This time it surely had been all over with Stokoe. But the foot of the hectoring little foreigner slipped, or he stumbled owing to some slight inequality of the ground. For a single instant the man was overbalanced and off his guard, and before he could recover, Frank Stokoe's sword passed through his body, sending out of this world one who whilst in it had wrought much evil.

"Well done, Stokoe! Old Northumberland for ever!" cried a voice from amongst the considerable crowd of spectators who had run up before the fight had been in progress many seconds. "Well done, Stokoe!"

Here was danger greater even than that from which he had but now escaped. He was recognised! And for him to be recognised in London probably meant instant arrest, and an almost certain end on the gallows. He was too deeply involved in the late Rebellion; King George's Government would show him as little mercy as they had showed to his chief.

Stokoe glanced round uneasily as he wiped his sword, but it was not possible to say which in the group of spectators was the man who had given that compromising cry; it might be one of several who, to Stokoe's extreme discomposure, seemed to look at him rather intently. Time to be out of this, thought he; the farther he was from London the more freely he would breathe just at present, and the less chance was there of that breathing being permanently stopped. Policemen had not been invented in those days, and there was not much chance of his being arrested for duelling, for what was then called "the watch" was singularly inefficient, and seldom to be found when wanted. Nevertheless, it was now no easy matter for Stokoe to shake off the little "tail" of admirers who insisted on following him; it was not every day that they had the chance of seeing a man killed in fair fight, and they were loth to lose sight of the man who had done it—a hero in their eyes. However, by dint of plunging down one narrow street and up some other unsavoury alley, and repeating the manoeuvre at intervals, blinding his trail as far as possible, he at length shook off the last persevering remnant of his admirers, and, without being tracked or shadowed, gained the shelter of the house where he lodged. A few days saw him and his friends safely out of London, bearing with them the body of the Earl of Derwentwater, which was later buried at Dilston.

Frank Stokoe's position was an unfortunate one from now on. He was a proscribed man; his property had been seized, and those now in possession threatened if he put in an appearance, or made any attempt to regain the property, that they would give him up to Government. Times consequently became hard for poor Stokoe; his affairs went from bad to worse, and though his name was included in the general pardon which Government issued some time later, he never got back his land nor any of his possessions. Part of the land passed with the Derwentwater Estate to Greenwich Hospital, part, including the peel tower, where he and his ancestors had lived for generations, remained in the clutches of those who had seized it. Old age came upon Frank and found him poverty-stricken; want came, "as an armed man," and found him too weak to resist. The spirit was there, but no longer the strength that should have helped the spirit. He sank and died, leaving behind him no shred of worldly gear.

Another noted Northumbrian who was "out" in the '15 was him whom men then called "Mad Jack Hall" of Otterburn. Not that he was in any sense mad, or even of weak intellect—far from it; the name merely arose from the fiery energy of the man, and from the reckless courage with which he would face any danger or any odds. As a man, he was extremely popular, and no one could have been more beloved by his dependents. His fine estate he managed himself, and managed well, though before he went "out" misfortunes fell on him which no management could have averted. They were misfortunes so crushing, and following so immediately on each other's heels, that amongst the simple country folk they were looked on, and spoken of, with awe, as manifestly judgments from Heaven for some fancied sin they supposed him to have committed. He might, people said, have prevented, but did not prevent, a duel which took place in the streets of Newcastle, in which a very popular young man was killed. It was "murder," and no fair fight, folk said; and, whatever the rights of the case, at least the successful duellist was afterwards hanged for the murder. Hall's failure to interfere seems to have strained his popularity for a time. In such circumstances people are prone to assume that an all-wise Providence, necessarily seeing eye to eye with them, inflicts some special punishment on the person who has sinned some special sin, or who has, at all events, done (or not done) something which, in the popular judgment, he should not have done (or done, as the case may be). Misfortune or accident comes to some one who has roused popular clamour. "I told you so," cries the public; "a judgment!"

In this instance, the sin of not interfering to prevent a duel—or a murder, as popular opinion called it—was punished, firstly, by Hall's house at Otterburn being burned to the ground, together with all his farm buildings and great part of his farm stock; and, secondly, this grievous loss was followed in the time of harvest by a devastating flood in the Rede, which swept away from the rich, low-lying haughs every particle of the fat crops which already had been cut, and were now merely waiting to be carried home.

By such drastic means having apparently been purged of his sin, Mr. Hall seems to have regained his normal popularity, and an incident which presently occurred raised it to an even greater height than before. As far back at least as the time of Cromwell it had been customary to send offenders against the law, political prisoners and the like who were not judged quite worthy of the gallows or the block, to what in Charles the Second's day were called His Majesty's Plantations—our colonies, that is, in America or the West Indies. Not only were "incorrigible rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars" thus dealt with, but those also who attended illegal prayer-meetings found themselves in the same box if they happened to have been previously convicted of this heinous offence; and the moss-troopers of Northumberland and Cumberland were treated in similar fashion when taken—deported from their own heathery hills and grey, weeping skies, to the hot swamps and savannahs of Jamaica or Virginia. In the beginning, those sentenced were merely compelled, under penalty of what Weir of Hermiston called being "weel haangit," to remove themselves to the Plantations. Later, a custom sprang up under which criminals of all sorts were delivered over by the authorities to the tender mercies of contractors, who engaged to land them in the West Indies or America, it being one of the conditions of the contract that the services of the prisoner were the property of the contractor for a given number of years. On landing, these wretched prisoners were put up to auction and sold to the highest bidder—in other words, they were slaves. Many men made large sums of money in this inhuman trade, trafficking in the lives of their fellow-countrymen. The thing at last reached such a pitch that practically no able-bodied man was safe from the danger of being kidnapped, sold to some dealer, and shipped off to slavery in the Plantations. That was the fate of many a young man who mysteriously disappeared from the ken of his friends in those seventeenth- and eighteenth-century days. Once shipped to the Plantations, the chance was small of a man ever returning to his native land. Fever, brought on by exposure to the hot sun and heavy rain of a tropical or semi-tropical climate, took care of that; in the West Indies, at least, they died like flies. Not many had the luck, or the constitution, of one Henry Morgan, who, kidnapped in Bristol when a boy and sold as a slave in Barbadoes, lived to be one of the most famous—or rather notorious—buccaneers of all time, and died a knight, Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, and commander of our forces in that island.

It was "Mad Jack Hall's" fortune to save from this fate of being kidnapped and sent to rot in fever-laden swamps of the West Indies a young Northumbrian at that time in his service. It was the time of year when Stagshaw Bank Fair was held, and Mr. Hall, meaning to attend the fair, had instructed this young man to join him there at a certain hour, and himself had ridden over to Corbridge, there to pass the night. In the morning, when Jack Hall reached the fair at the appointed hour, he was astonished to find his servant, very dejected in appearance, being led away in charge of a man on horseback. Hall questioned the lad, who brightened up vastly at sight of his master, but could give no explanation as to the cause of this interference. All he knew was that as he stood waiting for Mr. Hall, this man had ridden up, claimed him as a prisoner, and was now marching him off. Hall looked at the mounted man, and recognised him as one of a family named Widdrington, who claimed to be invested by the Government of Queen Anne with authority to arrest from time to time sundry persons who, so far as the general public knew, were guilty of no crime, but who nevertheless were in the end sent to the dreaded Plantations. These Widdringtons were greatly feared throughout the countryside, but as they had always selected their victims from amongst people who had few friends, and who were little likely to have the means of making any great outcry, no person of influence had yet been moved to take the matter up, or to make troublesome inquiries.

Hall, however, was not the man to let his servant be taken without protest, even if this Widdrington really had the authority he claimed to possess. But to all Hall's remonstrances Widdrington merely replied haughtily that he was accountable to no one, save only to her most gracious Majesty the Queen; that he was there in the execution of his duty, and that anyone interfering with him did so at his own peril. The situation was awkward. On the one hand, if this man really was acting within his rights and in the execution of his duty, then Hall himself was likely to get into serious trouble; on the other, he was not going to see a young man, his own servant, a man, so far as he knew, innocent of all offence against the law, marched off in this way, if by any means he might be saved. As mere remonstrances appeared to be of no avail, Hall hotly pressed his horse close up to Widdrington's, completely barring his way, and demanded that, if he were really acting within the law, he should show his authority.

"This is my authority," cried Widdrington, drawing his sword.

"We'll soon prove whether that's strong enough," replied Hall, jumping from his horse and also drawing his weapon. There was, as it chanced, close to the lane in which the two had been wrangling, a bit of nice level ground covered with short, crisp turf, and to this Hall quickly made his way, followed by Widdrington and by a crowd of people who had run up from the fair, attracted by the quarrel. A very few minutes sufficed to prove that Widdrington's "authority" was not strong enough. He fought well enough for a time, it is true, and his opponent had need of all the skill he could command, but within five minutes Hall had caught Widdrington's point in the big basket hilt of his sword, and with a sudden jerk had sent the weapon flying, leaving the disarmed man entirely at his mercy. That was enough to satisfy Hall, who was too much of a man to push his advantage further. But it by no means satisfied the surrounding crowd of country people. By them these Widdringtons had long been feared and detested, and only the belief in the minds of those simple country folk that, in some mysterious way beyond their ken, the law was on the side of their oppressors, had on more than one occasion prevented an outbreak of popular fury. Here, now, was one of the hated brood, proven to be in the wrong, and with no authority to arrest beyond that bestowed by bluster and brute force. The air grew thick with groans and savage threats, and a clod flung by a boy gave the mob a lead. In an instant sticks and stones began to fly. Widdrington was unable to reach his sword or to get to his horse; there was nothing for it but to take to his heels, pursued by a crowd thirsting for his blood. That was the last of the oppression of the Widdringtons; their horrible traffic in human beings was ended, and none of them ever again dared show their faces in that part of the country.

As for Hall, henceforward an angel of light could not have been more highly regarded, and his fate, a very few years later, brought grief on the county almost as universal as that felt for the Earl of Derwentwater himself.

Hall was at Preston with Derwentwater, but he did not, like Frank Stokoe, ride for it when Forster surrendered. One would almost have expected a man of his fiery, reckless disposition to have made a dash for it, and to fight his way through or fall in the attempt. Perhaps he considered it a point of honour to stick by his friends, and share their fate, whatever it might be. Anyhow, he surrendered with the rest, and with the rest was condemned to death. Time after time he was reprieved, owing to the exertions of friends who happened to be high in favour with the Hanoverian King's Government, but time after time he was recommitted, and finally Tyburn saw the last of poor "Mad Jack Hall." They hanged him on the 13th of July 1716.



SEWINGSHIELDS CASTLE, AND THE SUNKEN TREASURE OF BROOMLEE LOUGH

The old castle of Sewingshields is one of which there are many legends. If local tradition might be accepted as a guide, we should find that Arthur the King lived there once on a time. But surely another Arthur than him of whom Tennyson sang. One,

"Not like that Arthur, who, with lance in rest, From spur to plume a star of tournament, Shot through the lists at Camelot, and charged Before the eyes of ladies and of kings,"

but a being even more mythical than that Arthur to whom, with his knights, legend assigns so many last resting-places—in that vast hall beneath the triple peak of Eildon, here in a cavern below the rocks at Sewingshields, and in many a spot besides. This Arthur of Sewingshields in his feats was indeed more akin to the old Norse gods and heroes. And it is told that, as he talked with his Queen one day when they sat on those great rocks to the north of the castle, which still bear as names the King's and the Queen's Crag, Guinevere chanced to let fall a remark which angered Arthur; whereupon he, snatching up a rock that lay ready to his hand, hurled it at his royal consort. Now, Guinevere at the moment was combing her long, fair locks; but she saw the stone come hurtling through the air, and, with remarkable presence of mind and dexterity, with her comb she fended off the missile, so that it fell between them, doing no harm. And if anyone should presume to disbelieve this tale, there lies the rock to this day, and the marks of the teeth of the Queen's comb are on it still for all to see. The distance that the King hurled this missile is not above a quarter of a mile, and the pebble itself may weigh a trifle of twenty tons or so.

Local tradition tells also how once on a time there came to Sewingshields, to visit Arthur, a great chieftain from the wild north, one named Cumin. And when Cumin departed from the castle to go back to his own land, he bore with him a certain gold cup that Arthur, in token of friendship, had given to him. But sundry of the King's retainers, having learned that the Scot was bearing away with him this cup, greatly desired that they might themselves possess it, and they pursued Cumin, and slew him ere he had gone many miles. Wherefore Arthur caused a cross to be erected there on the spot where the slain man fell; and the place is called Cumming's Cross to this day.

Of the building of the castle of Sewingshields, or Seven-shields, there is the legend told in Harold the Dauntless:

"The Druid Urien had daughters seven, Their skill could call the moon from heaven; So fair their forms and so high their fame, That seven proud kings for their suitors came.

King Mador and Rhys came from Powis and Wales, Unshorn was their hair, and unpruned were their nails; From Strath-Clywd came Ewain, and Ewain was lame, And the red-bearded Donald from Galloway came.

Lot, King of Lodon, was hunchback'd from youth, Dunmail of Cumbria had never a tooth; But Adolph of Bambrough, Northumberland's heir; Was gay and was gallant, was young and was fair.

There was strife 'mongst the sisters, for each one would have For husband King Adolph, the gallant and brave; And envy bred hate, and hate urged them to blows, When the firm earth was cleft, and the Arch-fiend arose!

He swore to the maidens their wish to fulfil— They swore to the foe they would work by his will, A spindle and distaff to each hath he given, 'Now hearken my spell,' said the Outcast of Heaven.

'Ye shall ply these spindles at midnight hour, And for every spindle shall rise a tower, Where the right shall be feeble, the wrong shall have power, And there shall ye dwell with your paramour.'

Beneath the pale moonlight they sate on the wold, And the rhymes which they chaunted must never be told; And as the black wool from the distaff they sped, With blood from their bosom they moisten'd the thread.

As light danced the spindles beneath the cold gleam, The castle arose like the birth of a dream— The seven towers ascended like mist from the ground, Seven portals defend them, seven ditches surround.

Within that dread castle seven monarchs were wed, But six of the seven ere the morning lay dead; With their eyes all on fire, and their daggers all red, Seven damsels surround the Northumbrian's bed.

'Six kingly bridegrooms to death we have done, Six gallant kingdoms King Adolf hath won; Six lovely brides all his pleasure to do, Or the bed of the seventh shall be husbandless too.'

Well chanced it that Adolf the night when he wed Had confessed and had sain'd him ere boune to his bed; He sprung from the couch, and his broadsword he drew, And there the seven daughters of Urien he slew.

The gate of the castle he bolted and seal'd, And hung o'er each arch-stone a crown and a shield; To the cells of St. Dunstan then wended his way, And died in his cloister an anchorite grey.

Seven monarchs' wealth in that castle lies stow'd, The foul fiends brood o'er them like raven and toad. Whoever shall questen these chambers within, From curfew to matins, that treasure shall win.

But manhood grows faint as the world waxes old! There lives not in Britain a champion so bold, So dauntless of heart, and so prudent of brain, As to dare the adventure that treasure to gain.

The waste ridge of Cheviot shall wave with the rye, Before the rude Scots shall Northumberland fly, And the flint cliffs of Bambro' shall melt in the sun Before that adventure be perill'd and won."

Long afterwards, when Harold the Dauntless entered the castle, the seven shields still hung where Adolf had placed them, each blazoned with its coat of arms:

"A wolf North Wales had on his armour coat, And Rhys of Powis-land a couchant stag; Strath Clwyd's strange emblem was a stranded boat; Donald of Galloway's a trotting nag; A corn-sheaf gilt was fertile Lodon's brag; A dudgeon-dagger was by Dunmail worn; Northumbrian Adolf gave a sea-beat crag; Surmounted by a cross,—such signs were borne Upon these antique shields, all wasted now and worn."

And within the castle, in that chamber where Adolf repelled the embarrassing advances of that most unmaidenly band of sisters, and did "a slaughter grim and great":

"There of the witch brides lay each skeleton, Still in the posture as to death when dight; For this lay prone, by one blow slain outright; And that, as one who struggles long in dying; One bony hand held knife, as if to smite; One bent on fleshless knees, as mercy crying; One lay across the floor, as kill'd in act of flying."

Perhaps it is part of the wealth of those "seven monarchs" that now lies sunken in Broomlee Lough. Did some one, greatly daring, "adventure that treasure to win," and succeed in his attempt? Tradition tells that a dweller in Sewingshields Castle, long ago, being compelled to flee the country, and unable to bear away with him his hoard of gold, resolved to sink it in the lough. Rowing, therefore, far out into deep water, he hove overboard a chest containing all his treasure, putting on it a spell that never should it be again seen till brought to land by aid of "Twa twin yauds, twa twin oxen, twa twin lads, and a chain forged by a smith of kind."

Long centuries the treasure remained unsought; yet all men might know exactly where lay the chest beneath the waves, for it mattered not how fierce blew the gale, above the gold the surface of the water was ever unbroken. At last there came one who heard the tradition, and set about the task of recovering the sunken chest. The twin horses, twin oxen, and twin lads he procured readily enough, but to find a smith of kind was not so easy—"a smith of kind" being a blacksmith whose ancestors for six generations have been smiths, he himself being the seventh generation. But this, too, at length was found, and the smith forged the necessary length of chain. Then, taking advantage of a favourable day, when breeze sufficient blew to reveal the tell-tale spot of calm water, the treasure-hunter started in his boat, leaving one end of the chain on shore and paying out fathom after fathom as his boat swept round the calm and again reached shore. Now hitching the yauds to one end and the oxen to the other, the animals were cautiously started by the twin drivers. Slowly the chain swept over the bed of the lough, and tightened, fast in something heavy that gave and came shoreward in the bight of the chain. Cannily the drivers drove, and ever came the weight nearer to dry land. Already the treasure-seeker in his boat, peering eagerly down into the quiet water, fancied that he was a made man; he could almost see that box. But a few more yards and it was his. Alas! In his eagerness to secure "a smith of kind" he had made insufficient inquiries into that smith's ancestry. There was (as he discovered when too late) a flaw in his pedigree! Some ancestress, it was said, could not show her marriage lines, or something else was wrong. At any rate, there was a flaw, and that was sufficient to upset the whole thing, for the chain, not being made by a smith of kind, was of course not of the true temper. Hence, just when success was about to crown their efforts, the horses made a violent plunge forward—and the chain parted at a weak link! No further attempts to ascertain the exact bearings of that box have ever been successful. It is, as of old, at the bottom of the lough—at least so says tradition.

And Sewingshields Castle is now no longer a castle; its very vaults and its walls have disappeared.

"No towers are seen On the wild heath, but those that Fancy builds, And save a fosse that tracks the moor with green, Is nought remains to tell of what may there have been."



THE KIDNAPPING OF LORD DURIE

"It is commonly reported that some party, in a considerable action before the Session, finding that Lord Durie could not be persuaded to think his plea good, fell upon a stratagem to prevent the influence and weight which his lordship might have to his prejudice, by causing some strong masked men to kidnap him, in the Links of Leith, at his diversion on a Saturday afternoon, and transport him to some blind and obscure room in the country, where he was detained captive, without the benefit of daylight, a matter of three months (though otherwise civilly and well entertained); during which time his lady and children went in mourning for him as dead. But after the cause aforesaid was decided, the Lord Durie was carried back by incognitos, and dropt in the same place where he had been taken up." (Forbes's Journal of the Session, Edinburgh, 1714.)

With the early part of the seventeenth century, moss-trooping in the Border country had not yet come to an end. Its glory, no doubt, and its glamour, had begun to fade before even the sixteenth century was far spent, and where were now to be found heroes such as the far-famed Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie? Yet, as a few stout-hearted leaves, defiant of autumn's fury, will cling to the uttermost branches of a forest tree, so, in spite of King or Court, there were even now some reckless souls, scornful of new-fangled modern ways and more than content to follow in the footsteps of their grandsires, who still held fast to precept and practice of what seemed to them "the good old days." It is true their reiving partook now somewhat more of the nature of horse-stealing pure and simple. No longer were fierce raids over the English Border permissible; not now could they, practically with impunity, "drive" the cattle of those with whom they were at feud, and live on the stolen beeves of England till such time as the larder again grew bare. The times were sadly degenerate; Border men all too quickly were becoming soft and effeminate.

Yet in Eskdale there was one patriot, at least, who boasted himself that as his fathers had been, so was he. Willie Armstrong of Gilnockie was that man—"Christie's Will," he was commonly called, a great-grandson of the famous Johnnie, and not unworthy of his descent. Had he lived when Johnnie flourished, there might indeed have been two Armstrongs equally famous. As it was, Willie spent his days at constant feud with the law, and even the strong walls of Gilnockie were not for him always a secure shelter. Once it befell that the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, the Earl of Traquair, visiting Jedburgh, there found Willie lying in the "tolbooth."

"Now, what's broucht ye to this, Gilnockie?" the Earl inquired.

"Oh, nocht but having twa bit tethers in my hand, my lord," said Willie. But: "Weel, I wadna say but there micht mebbes hae been twa cowt at the tae end o' the tethers," he admitted, on being pressed by the Earl.

Now, it happened that Willie was well known to Lord Traquair—had, in fact, more than once been of considerable service to his lordship; and it was no failing of the Earl to desert a friend in trouble, if help might be given quietly and judiciously. So it came about that the prison gates swung back for Christie's Will, the halter no longer threatened his neck, and Lord Traquair acquired a follower who to repay his debt of gratitude would stick at nothing.

Some little time later it chanced that a great lawsuit fell to be decided in the Court of Session. In this lawsuit Lord Traquair was deeply concerned. A verdict in his favour was of vital importance to him, but he very well knew that the opinion of the presiding judge was likely to be unfavourable to his claim, and that should Lord Durie preside, the case in that event would almost certainly go against him. Could that judge, however, by any means be quietly spirited away from Edinburgh before the date fixed for the trial, with almost equal certainty he might count on a favourable verdict. In this predicament Lord Traquair turned his thoughts to Christie's Will; if anyone could aid him it must be the bold Borderer.

"'Bethink how ye sware, by the salt and the bread, By the lightning, the wind, and the rain, That if ever of Christie's Will I had need, He would pay me my service again.'"

And Lord Traquair did not plead in vain. It was a little thing to do, Will thought, for one who had saved him from the gallows tree.

"'O mony a time, my lord,' he said, 'I've stown the horse frae the sleeping loon; But for you I'll steal a beast as braid, For I'll steal Lord Durie frae Edinboro toon.'"

* * * * *

A light northerly breeze piped shrill through the long bent grass beyond Leith Links, sweeping thin and nippingly across shining sands left bare by a receding tide; down by the rippling water-line, as the sun of a late spring day neared his setting, clamouring gulls bickered noisily over the possession of some fishy dainty. Out from near-lying patches of whin, and from the low, wind-blown sand-hills, rabbits stole warily, nibbling the short herbage now and then, but ever with an air of suspicion and manifest unease, for behind a big clump of whin, during half the day there had lain hid a thick-set, powerfully built man.

"De'il tak' the body!" he grumbled, sitting up and stretching himself as he glanced along the beach; "he's lang o' comin'."

As he gazed, the sight of a distant horseman riding westward brought him sharply to his feet, and snatching up a long cloak that lay by his side, he walked leisurely through the yielding sand till he reached the firm beach within tide mark, along which the horseman was now quietly cantering.

"Ye'll be Lord Durie, I'm thinkin'," he cried, raising his hand to stay the rider, a middle-aged, legal-faced man, who sat his sober steed none too confidently, with thighs but lightly wed to the saddle.

"Yes, I'm Lord Durie. What can I do for you?"

"Weel, my lord, I've come far to see ye. They say there's no' a lawyer leevin' or deid that kens mair nor you on a' thing. It's jist a bit plea that I've gotten," said the man, laying a hand on the horse's neck and sidling along close to his rider's knee.

"For onny advice on kittle points o' law, ye maun go to counsel, my friend. I'm a judge, no' an advocate. Gude e'en to ye."

"Ay, but, my lord," said the man, laying a detaining left hand on the near rein, "it's this way it is; ye see—" and at that, with a sudden powerful upward push of the unskilled rider's leg, Lord Durie was hurled from the saddle and lay sprawling on his back on the wet sand, as the horse sprang forward with a startled bound.

"Goad's sake! what's this o't?" cried the poor judge, already tangled in the folds of the long cloak, and struggling to rise. "Wad ye murder are o' his Majesty's judges!"

"Lie still, my lord, lie still! There's no skaith will come to ye 'gin ye but lie still. De'il's i' the body; wull the auld lurdane no hand sae!"

Of small avail were the judge's struggles; as well might an infant struggle in the folds of a python. Ere even an elderly man's scant breath was quite spent, he lay among the whins, bound hand and foot, trussed like a fowl, and with the upper part of his body and his head wrapped in the stifling folds of the great cloak.

That was the last of the outer world that Lord Durie knew or saw for many a long day. His horse, with muddied saddle, and broken reins trailing on the ground (muddied and broken, no doubt, by the horse rolling), was found next day grazing on the links. But of the judge, no trace. He might—as some, with the superstition of the day, were disposed to believe[1]—have been spirited away by a warlock; or, perhaps, even like Thomas the Rhymer, he had vanished into Fairyland. Tidings of him there were none. The flowing waters of the Forth had effectually wiped out his horse's tracks along the shore, and during the night a rising wind had effaced the footsteps of his captor in the dry loose sand between tide-mark and links. Thus every trace of him was lost. His body, maybe, might have drifted out to sea; perhaps it lay now by the rocks of some lonely shore, or on the sands, with mouth a-wash and dead hands playing idly with the lapping water. Wife and family mourned as for one dead. And after the first nine days' wonder, even in Parliament House and Law Courts, for lack of food speculation as to his fate languished and died. A successor filled his office.

[1: In the seventeenth century belief in witchcraft was almost at its height over the whole of Europe, and in Scotland the hunt after witches and warlocks was peculiarly vindictive. To obtain confession, the most incredible tortures—as cruel as anything practised by Red Indians on their prisoners—were inflicted on accused persons, men and women, and escape was seldom possible for these poor creatures. Nor were such beliefs and practices confined to the benighted times of the seventeenth century. Even as late as 1722, in Sutherlandshire, a woman was burned for witchcraft. Her crime was that she had transformed her own daughter into a pony, and had ridden her throughout an entire night. Conclusive proof of the charge was found in the fact that the poor woman's daughter was lame afterwards both in hands and feet.

Nothing was too absurd, no charge too wicked or too childish, to obtain universal belief in those times.]

Meantime, bound to the saddle in front of his captor, by little-known hill paths the judge had been borne swiftly through the night. The long, melancholy wail of a whaup, the eerie hoot of an owl, at times smote dully on his ear; but to all his entreaties and his questions no human voice made answer; in stony silence his abductor rode steadily on. Over hill and dale, over rough ground and smooth, splashing through marshy soil where the hoofs of the heavily laden horse sucked juicily, through burns, and across sodden peaty moor where the smell of swamp rose rank on the night air, they floundered; and once the homely smell of peat reek told the unhappy judge that they passed within hail of some human dwelling. But throughout the night he saw nothing, and gradually the long strain, the discomfort of being pitched forward or back as the horse scrambled up or down where the ground was extra rough and broken, the pain of sitting half in, half out, of a saddle, told upon a frame unaccustomed to much exercise, and at intervals he wholly or partially lost consciousness. Thus unutterably distressed in body and broken in spirit, in one of these partial lapses it seemed to the judge—as it might be in some disordered nightmare—that there came a respite from the torment of ceaseless motion, and that by means of some unknown agency he lay in heavenly peace, stretched full length on a couch or bed. He thought—or did he dream?—that he had heard, as it were far off, the muffled trairip of feet and the murmur of low voices; and it seemed almost as if his body, after falling from some vast height, had been lifted and gently swung in the air. But exhaustion of mind and body was so great that the problem of what might be happening was quite beyond solution; let him only rest and sleep.

Then, later, it seemed to him that he woke from broken, tossing slumber. But it was dark, and he fell again into an uneasy doze, in which every muscle and bone in his harassed old body ached pitifully, every spot of sorely chafed skin stung and burned, till the multitude of pains put an end to sleep. Where was he, and how had he got there? On a low couch, free and unbound, he lay; by his side, on a rude table, was food and a jack of small-beer. Whether the time was morning or evening he could not tell, but it was very dark; what little light entered the room came through a narrow slit, high up in the wall, and all things smelled strangely of damp. Somewhere he could hear faintly a slow, shuffling step and the rustle of a dress; then the mew of a cat. Where was he?

Few, very few, persons at that day were above the weakness of a firm belief in witchcraft; even a judge of the Court of Session would not dare openly to question the justice and humanity of the Mosaical law: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Superstition was rampant, and to Lord Durie there had ever seemed nothing incongruous in accepting belief in the undoubted existence of both witches and warlocks. Could it be that he was now actually in the power of such beings? His mind was yet in a whirl, and he could form to himself no connected account of yesterday's happenings, if indeed it was really yesterday, and not in some remote, far-away time, that he had last ridden along the sands of Leith. Thirst consumed him, but he hesitated to drink; if he were now in the hands of those wretches who, it was well known, that they might work evil sold themselves to the Prince of Darkness, then might it not be that by voluntarily drinking, his soul would be delivered into the clutches of the Evil One? The thought brought him painfully to his feet with many a groan, and roused him to a careful examination of his gloomy prison. Rough stone walls, oozing damp, an earthen floor, three stone steps leading up to a heavy iron-studded door in a corner of the room; and nothing else. The one small window was far out of his reach. A feeling of faintness crept over him; it might be a wile of Satan, or a spell cast over him by supernatural powers, but the time was past for hesitation, and he drank a great draught from the jack, sank feebly on the couch, and slept profoundly.

When the judge again awoke it was in a prison somewhat less gloomy, for a thin splash of pale sunlight now struck the wall, and gave light sufficient to show every corner of the room. Again Lord Durie went through his fruitless search, and then, feeling hungry, and having suffered no visible ill effects from his first incautious draught of small-beer, he ate and drank heartily. From the way in which the patch of sunlight crept up the wall, it was easy to tell that the time was evening. Could it indeed be that no more than twenty-four hours back he had ridden, secure and free from this horrible care, along the shining sands by the crisp salt wavelets of the Forth?

What was that voice that he now heard, thin and hollow, on the evening air? "Far yaud! far yaud!" and then, with eldritch scream, "Bauty," it cried. Such sounds, coming from he knew not where, fell disturbingly on the unaccustomed ears of a seventeenth-century Judge of Session, and Lord Durie's sleep that night was broken by grim dreams.

Day followed day, week pressed on the heels of week, and still never a human face smiled on the unhappy judge. Each morning he found on his little table a supply of food and drink, all good of their kind and plenty—boiled beef or mutton, oaten cakes, pease bannocks, and always the jack of small-beer—but never did he see human hand place them there, never did human form cheer him by its presence.

The solitary confinement and the utter want of occupation told on a nervous, somewhat highly strung temperament; and in the judge's mind superstition began to hold unquestioned sway. Things taught him in childhood by an old nurse, things which now folks, indeed, still believed, but which he himself had to some extent given up or dismissed from his thoughts, began to crowd back again into his brain. No mere human power, surely, could have brought him here as he had been brought. Was it in the dungeon of some sorcerer, of some disciple of the Devil, that he now lay? Then, the shuffling old step that he heard so frequently, the thin voice calling, "Hey! Maudge," followed always by the mewing of a cat—what could that be but some old hag, given over to evil deeds, talking to her familiar? It was but the other day that, with his own eyes, he had seen nine witches burned together on Leith Sands, and all, ere they died, had confessed to the most horrid commerce with the Devil. It was no great time since a witch, under torture, had revealed in her confession the terrible truth, of how two hundred women had been wont to flock at night to a certain kirk in North Berwick, there to listen eagerly to Satan preaching blasphemy and denouncing the King. Even a judge was not safe from their malice. And could he but escape from the snare in which he now lay entangled, assuredly, Lord Durie thought, there should be more witch-burnings.

So the weeks dragged past, and Lord Durie lost all reckoning of the flight of time; but ever the belief strengthened that it was no mere human power that held him in bondage. And this belief received confirmation at last, for he awoke one night from confused and heavy sleep, to find himself once more bound, and wrapped, body and head, in the thick folds of a cloak. Then, seemingly without moving from his bed, he was borne through the air and set upon a horse; and again began that awful journey which once before he had endured. This time, too, in confirmation of his theory of the supernatural, when he came to his full senses it was to find himself lying behind a clump of whins by the sands of Leith, near to the very spot where, ages before, he had met a strange-looking man who tried to draw him into conversation on law. And nowhere was any cloak to be seen, nor trace of human agency. Only, he ached sorely, and his legs almost refused to bear the weight of his body, and in his head was the buzzing as of a thousand bees.

It was warlocks who had dealt with him—so his family and all his friends agreed when his tale was told. But his successor in office mourned, perhaps, that their dealings had not been more effectual, for he liked ill to give up a post he had filled with ability for an all too short three months.

To Lord Durie's regret, his return was too late to enable him to preside in the famous case which was about to come on shortly after the date of his disappearance. That had already been decided in a manner of which he could not have failed to disapprove, and Lord Traquair had secured a verdict.

For long the judge held to the warlock theory, and he was not averse, after dinner, over a bottle, from telling at great length the story of his terrible experiences during those mysterious three months of captivity. Younger men, indeed, began to find the tale somewhat boring, and in private some had been known to wish that the devil had flown away permanently with Lord Durie. But those scoffers were chiefly a few rising young advocates; the judge's family and his friends accepted the tale in its entirety. Nor ever did any man, to the end of his days, actually hear Lord Durie express doubt as to the supernatural nature of his adventure.

Yet something did happen, later, which at least seemed in some measure to have shaken his faith, and it was noticed that, towards the end of his life, he was not fond of dwelling on the subject—had even been known, in fact, to become irritable when pressed to tell his story. It fell out, a year or two after the events which he had loved to narrate, that Lord Durie had occasion to visit Dumfries. On the way back to Edinburgh, travelling with some colleagues, it chanced that a heavy storm caught them, and necessity drove them to take shelter for the night in a farmhouse near to an old peel tower which stood on the verge of the wild moorland country beyond Moffat.

That night Lord Durie, in his stuffy box-bed, dreamed a terrible dream. He was once more in the power of the wizard or warlock; and it seemed to him that in his dream he even heard again those mysterious words that had once so haunted him. With a start he woke, bathed in perspiration, to find that day had broken, and that from the hillside echoed the long-drawn cry: "Far yaud! Far yaud! Bauty!" While, ben the house, he could hear a slow, shuffling step, and a thin old voice quavering: "Hey, Maudge!" to a mewing cat.

"What was yon cry oot on the hill? Oh, jist oor Ailick cryin' on his dowg, Bauty, to weer the sheep," said the grey-haired, brown-faced old woman to whom they had owed their shelter for the night.

"Veesitors?" she continued, in reply to further questions. "Na. We hae nae veesitors here. There was aince a puir sick man lay twa three months i' the auld tower yont by, a year or twa back, but there's been nae veesitors. They said he was daft, an' I was kind o' feared whiles to gie him his meat. But, oh, he wad be jist a silly auld body that did naebody hairm. Na, I never richtly got sicht o' his face, for I aye put his bit meat an' drink doon beside him whan he was sleepin'. An' them that broucht him took him awa again whan they thoucht he was some better."

It was noted that after this visit Lord Durie no longer pursued the subject of warlocks.

[NOTE.—The story of Lord Durie's abduction and captivity is differently told by Chambers in his Domestic Annals of Scotland, as far, at least, as the instigator of the kidnapping and its accomplisher are concerned. It is there recorded that the maker of the plot to kidnap the judge was George Meldrum the Younger of Dumbreck. Accompanied by two Jardines and a Johnston—good Border names—and by some other men, Meldrum seized Lord Durie and a friend near St. Andrews, robbed them of their purses, then carried the judge across the Firth of Forth to the house of one William Kay in Leith, thence past Holyrood, and, by way doubtless of Soutra Hill, to Melrose, from which town he was hurried over the Border to Harbottle, and there held prisoner. An account of the trial of the perpetrators of the abduction is to be found in Pitcairns' Criminal Trials. Sir Walter Scott, however, in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, gives to Will Armstrong of Gilnockie the credit, or discredit, of carrying out the abduction single-handed. Will was certainly a much more picturesque ruffian than ever was Meldrum, and many a wild deed might be safely fathered on him.

Tradition tells of his long ride to convey important papers from Lord Traquair to King Charles I, and of his perilous return journey, bearing a reply from his Majesty. Tidings of his mission had come to the ears of the Parliamentarians, and orders were issued to seize him at Carlisle. In that town, Will, unwitting of special danger, had halted an hour to refresh man and beast, and as he proceeded on his journey, and was midway over the high, narrow bridge across the Eden, the sudden clatter of horses' feet and the jingle of accoutrements at either end of the bridge showed him that his way was effectually blocked by the Roundhead troopers. Without a moment's hesitation, Will faced his horse at the parapet, and with a touch of the spur and a wild cheer over went the pair into the flooded river, disappearing in the tawny, foaming water with a mighty splash. Instead of hastening along the bank, Cromwell's troopers crowded on to the bridge, gazing with astonishment into the raging torrent. Thus, when Will and his horse, still unparted, came to the surface a considerable way down, there was time for them to reach the bank. But the bank was steep and the landing bad, and the weight of Will's saturated riding-cloak was the last straw that hindered the horse from scrambling up. With a curse Will cut the fastening that held the cloak about his neck, and, relieved from the extra weight, the animal with a desperate struggle gained the top of the bank and got away well ahead of the pursuing troopers. Had it not been for the speed and stamina of his horse, Will had surely been taken that night. As it was, ere they reached the Esk, one trooper was already far in front of his comrades, and thundering on Will's very heels. But a pistol pointed at his head by Will, a pistol with priming saturated, and incapable of being fired—had the man only thought of it—caused the trooper to draw back out of danger, and Will gained Esk's farther bank in safety, where, regardless of possible pistol shots, he waited to taunt his baffled pursuers.