of 1784-5, here he was in Kelso, stout, weather-beaten, grey-headed, over fifty, living within earshot of the deep voice of flooded Tweed roaring and fretting over the barrier with which the devil, at bidding of Michael Scott the Wizard, long syne dammed its course.  Many a time when the captain’s little vessel, close hauled, had been threshing through leaden-grey seas under hurrying, leaden-grey skies and bitter snow squalls, with a foul wind persistently pounding at her day after day, he had thought, as some more than ordinarily angry puff whitened the water to windward and broke him off his course, with the weather leech of his close-reefed topsail shivering, how pleasant it must be to be a landsman, to go where he pleased in spite of wind or weather.  Ah! they were the happy ones, those lucky landsmen, who could always do as they chose, blow high, blow low.

Well, here he was at last, drinking in all a landsman’s pleasures, enjoying his privileges—­and not too old yet, he told himself with self-conscious chuckle, to raise a pleasant flutter of expectation in the hearts of Kelso’s widows and maidens.  Not that he was a marrying man, he would sometimes protest; far from it, indeed.  Yet they did say that the landlord of a rival inn was heard to remark that “the cauptain gaed ower aften to Lucky G——­’s howf.  It wasna hardlys decent, an’ her man no deid a twalmonth.”  Maybe, however, the good widow’s brand of whisky was more grateful to the captain’s palate, or the company assembled in her snug parlour lightsomer, or at least less dour, than was to be found at the rival inn, where the landlord was an elder of the kirk and most stern opponent of all lightness and frivolity.  Whatever the cause, however, it is certain that the captain did acquire the habit of dropping in very frequently at the widow’s, where he was always a welcome guest.  And it was from a merry evening there that, with a “tumbler” or two inside his ample waistcoat, he set out for home one black February night when a gusty wind drove thin sleety rain rattling against the window panes of the quiet little town, and emptied the silent, moss-grown streets very effectively.

An hour or two later, it might be, two men, Adam Hislop and William Wallace, were noisily steering a somewhat devious and uncertain course homeward, when one of them tripped over a bulky object huddled on the ground, and with an astonished curse fell heavily.

“What the de’il’s that?  Guide us, it’s a man!  Some puir body the waur o’ his drink, ah’m thinkin’.  Haud up, maister!  Losh! it’s the cauptain,” he cried, as with the not very efficient aid of his friend he tried to raise the prostrate man.  But there was more than drink the matter here.