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.)