And so the fight went on, hour after hour, till many of the defenders had fallen, and the necessity of husbanding ammunition slackened the fire of Kerr and his comrades.  Then the Indians, knowing that the white men were few, abandoning caution tried to rush the breastwork.  But now necessarily they exposed themselves, and as the white men had reloaded the empty rifles of their dead and wounded comrades, and thus had at least two apiece ready, heavy toll was taken of the stormers, and the Redskins were beaten back.  Time and again was this repeated, once even during the night—­just before dawn.  But each attempt failed, and the baffled Indians finally drew off.

With thankful hearts, if with sore labour, the surviving white men, by lightening their vessel, got her off the ground, and succeeded in finding and stopping the leak.  A few days saw them again safely at Detroit.

No more, as a civilian, did Andrew Kerr face the Indians.  On getting back to New York in 1764 he was given a commission as ensign in the 1st battalion of the 42nd Regiment, and in various parts of the world he saw much service, finally retiring about 1780 with the rank of captain.  He did not wholly, however, sever his connection with the service, for later, after he had purchased an estate in the Border, and had married, he became a major in the Dumfries Militia.

It is given to few to pass a youth so stormy as Kerr’s, and to end, as he did, by becoming a peaceful, prosperous Border laird.

BORDER SNOWSTORMS

     “St. Agnes’ Eve—­ah, bitter chill it was! 
     The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
     The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,
     And silent was the flock in woolly fold.”

The great round-backed, solemn Border hills, in summer time kindly sleeping giants, smiling in their sleep, take on another guise when winter smites with pitiless blast, when

     “The sounds that drive wild deer and fox
     To shelter in the brake and rocks,”

bellow fearsomely among the crags, and down glen and burn rushes the White Death, bewildering, blinding, choking, and at the last, perhaps, with Judas kiss folding in its icy arms some luckless shepherd whom duty has sent from his warm fireside to the rescue of his master’s sheep.  You would not know for the same those hills that so little time gone past nursed you in their soft embrace.  Then, in the warm, sunny days, shadows of great fleecy clouds chased each other leisurely up the braes through the bracken and the purpling heather; the burn sang to itself a merry tune as it tumbled from boulder to boulder, rippling through pools where the yellow trout lay basking; on the clear air came the call of grouse, and afar off a solitary raven croaked in the stillness of a sun-steeped glen.  Now the bracken is dead, the bent sodden and chill with November’s sleet; against a background of heavy, leaden-grey sky the