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.