* * * * *

Less than a mile away, by some willows that once marked a ford in the river, men hurrying after the baying hounds came up too late.  Echoing across the heath, an agonised shriek rang on their ears, drowned by the snarling as of wild beasts.  Lying on its back on the river bank, head and shoulders in the shallow stream, the man-hunters found but a frail, mutilated body that had once been the wandering old minstrel.

This was what gave rise to the legend of the Grey Man of Bellister.  Ever since that hideous night, at intervals the “Grey Man” has been wont to appear to belated travellers along that road.  Near the clump of willows he might first be seen, hurrying, hurrying, his long grey cloak flying in the wind.  And woe to him on whom he chanced to turn and look; his wild eye and torn face, his blood-clotted beard, would freeze with horror those who gazed, and disaster or death followed hard on the track of the vision.

It is a hundred years now, and more, since last the “Grey Man” was seen.  Perhaps his penance for sins committed on earth is ended; or perhaps it is that against railways, and drainage, and modern scoffings, he and his like cannot stand.  He is gone; but even yet, about the scene where once as a man the old minstrel fled for dear life, there hangs at the dead time of night a sense of mystery and awe.  As the chilly wind comes wailing across the everlasting hills, blending its voice with the melancholy dirge of the river, one may almost believe that through the gloom there passes swiftly a bent, hurrying figure.  Perhaps it is but the swaying of a branch near by, that so startlingly suggests the waving in the wind of a threadbare cloak.

DICKY OF KINGSWOOD

Your Border ruffian of the good old days was not often a humorist.  Life to him was a serious business.  When he was not reiving other people’s kye, other people were probably reiving his; and as a general rule one is driven to conclude that he was not unlike that famous Scotch terrier whose master attributed the dog’s persistently staid and even melancholy disposition to the fact that he “jist couldna get enough o’ fechting.”

In olden times, “fechting” was the Border man’s strong point; but in later, and perhaps less robust, days there were to be found some who took a degenerate pride in getting by craft what their fathers would have taken by force.  Of such, in the early days of the eighteenth century, was Dicky of Kingswood.  Had he lived a hundred or a hundred and fifty years earlier, Dicky would no doubt have been a first-class reiver, one of the “tail” of some noted Border chieftain, for he lacked neither pluck nor strength.  But in his own day he preferred the suaviter in modo to the fortiter in re; his cunning, indeed, was not unworthy of the hero of that ancient Norse tale, “The Master Thief,” and in his misdeeds there was not seldom