unlike what a man of his very scrupulous habits would have selected in these days, kept its ground.  Such a son and parent could hardly fail in any of the other social relations.  No man was a firmer or more indefatigable friend.  I know not that he ever lost one; and a few with whom, during the energetic middle stage of life, from political differences or other accidental circumstances, he lived less familiarly, had all gathered round him, and renewed the full warmth of early affection in his later days.  There was enough to dignify the connexion in their eyes; but nothing to chill it on either side.  The imagination that so completely mastered him when he chose to give her the rein, was kept under most determined control when any of the positive obligations of active life came into question.  A high and pure sense of duty presided over whatever he had to do as a citizen and a magistrate; and, as a landlord, he considered his estate as an extension of his hearth.

J. LOCKHART.

* * * * *

MUMPS’S HALL.

There is, or rather I should say there was, a little inn, called Mumps’s Hall—­that is, being interpreted, Beggar’s Hotel—­near to Gilsland, which had not then attained its present fame as a Spa.  It was a hedge alehouse, where the Border farmers of either country often stopped to refresh themselves and their nags, in their way to and from the fairs and trysts in Cumberland, and especially those who came from or went to Scotland, through a barren and lonely district, without either road or pathway, emphatically called the Waste of Bewcastle.  At the period when the adventure about to be described is supposed to have taken place, there were many instances of attacks by freebooters, on those who travelled through this wild district; and Mumps’s Hall had a bad reputation for harbouring the banditti who committed such depredations.

An old and sturdy yeoman belonging to the Scottish side, by surname an Armstrong or Elliot, but well known by his sobriquet of Fighting Charlie of Liddesdale, and still remembered for the courage he displayed in the frequent frays which took place on the Border fifty or sixty years since, had the following adventure in the Waste, one of many which gave its character to the place:—­

Charlie had been at Stagshaw-bank fair, had sold his sheep or cattle, or whatever he had brought to market, and was on his return to Liddesdale.  There were then no country banks where cash could be deposited, and bills received instead, which greatly encouraged robbery in that wild country, as the objects of plunder were usually fraught with gold.  The robbers had spies in the fair, by means of whom they generally knew whose purse was best stocked, and who took a lonely and desolate road homeward—­those, in short, who were best worth robbing, and likely to be most easily robbed.