Many have been the snowy years since that in which MacGeorge threw away life for duty’s sake.  Besides winters, such as that hard “Crimean” one of 1854-5, there have been, for example, the terrible season of 1860-1, the bitter winter of 1878-9, when snow lay, practically unbroken, from November till March, and the frost was unrelenting in severity; and there have been others, too numerous to specify.  Many a man has perished on the hill, before and since, but no tragedy ever seized the popular imagination so firmly as did that on the Moffat road in 1831.  It is a district lonely enough even in summer time, that joint watershed of Tweed, Annan, and Clyde, but when winter gales sweep over those lofty moorlands, and snow drives down before the bitter blast, let no man unused to the hill attempt that road.  It was but the other year that a lonely shepherd’s wife near Tweedshaws, one stormy evening when snow drove wildly across the moor, thought that she heard the cry of a human voice come down the gale.  Again and again, as she sat by her cosy fire of glowing peat she imagined that some one called for help.  Again and again she rose, and opening the door, listened, but never, when she stood by the open door waiting for the call to come again, was anything to be heard but the noise of the storm and the rush of the wind, anything to be seen but the driving snow.  Long she listened, but the cry came no more, and naturally she concluded that imagination had fooled her.  In the morning, not very many yards away from the door, half-covered by its snowy winding-sheet, lay the stiff-frozen body of a young man.  There had been the breakdown of some vehicle down the road the previous evening, and he had thought to make his way to Moffat on foot.  Of what do men think when they are lost in the snow?  Of nothing, probably, one may conclude; very likely, before it has dawned upon them that there is danger, the mind, like the body, has become numbed with the cold, and they probably only think of rest and sleep.  To some spot sheltered from the blast they may perhaps have stumbled, and they pause to take breath.  After the turmoil through which they have been struggling, this sheltered spot seems a quiet little back-water, out of the raging torrent, peaceful, even warm, by comparison.  A little rest—­even, it may be, a few minutes’ sleep—­will revive them, and afterwards they will push on, refreshed.  All will be well; it is not far to safety.  And the snow falls quietly, ceaselessly, softly lapping them in its gentle folds, and the roar of the wind comes now from very far away—­their last lullaby, heard vaguely through “death’s twilight dim.”  The desire to sleep, men say, is irresistible, and once yielded to, sleep’s twin brother, death, is very near at hand.  There was found many years ago in the Border hills the body of a man, who had taken off his plaid, folded it carefully to make a pillow, on it had rested his head, and so had passed to his long rest, contented enough, if one might judge from the smile on his face.