Thereupon arose a babel of sound—­a shout, the scuffle and tramp of unsteady feet, noise of chairs pushed aside and overturned on the bare boards, servants running to and fro.  And Colonel Stewart, with clammy brow and failing limbs, sat silent in his chair, a dying man.

Captain Ross and his brother officer secured the swords of both men—­shutting the stable door, indeed, after the steed was stolen; in hot haste doctors were sent for; and ’mid the bustle and “strow” Eliott stumbled from the room and down the stair, “wanting his wig,” as the landlady, whom he passed on the way, deponed.  Sir Gilbert’s old and faithful servant hurried his master out of the inn, and behind a great tombstone in the Abbey churchyard hid him till the cool night air gave him sense to attempt escape.

In a thick wood near the head of Rulewater Sir Gilbert Eliott lay concealed, till his friends succeeded in smuggling him aboard a small craft off the coast of Berwickshire, and an outlaw, with a warrant out against him, he lived an uneasy life in Holland for some years, until influential friends with difficulty got him pardon, and enabled him again to return to the Border.

That is the story as it is usually known.  But it is fair to add that the tale is differently told in Chambers’ Domestic Annals of Scotland, where it is stated that Colonel Stewart was “a huffing, hectoring person,” and that he had given “great provocation, and gentlemen afterwards admitted that Stobbs was called upon by the laws of honour to take notice of the offence.”  Evidence given at the inquiry, however, hardly seems to favour this view.  Possibly neither side was quite free from blame; wine has other effects than to make glad the heart of man.

AULD RINGAN OLIVER

Amongst the flying, broken rabble that represented all that was left of the Covenanting army after the disastrous business of Bothwell Bridge, a dismounted Borderer, with one or two other stout hearts by no means disposed even now to give up the day, continued still to strike fiercely at Claverhouse’s pursuing troopers.  But their efforts to stem the tide of disaster were utterly without avail, and the Borderer, zealously protesting and struggling, was at length swept off the field by a wild panic rush of the fugitives.  Missing his footing on the broken ground as the flying mob pressed on to him, the Borderer fell, and, hampered by the bodies of a couple of wounded and exhausted countrymen, ere he could again struggle to his feet, the horse of more than one spurring rider had trampled over him, and he lay disabled and helpless, at the mercy of any dragoon who might chance to ride that way.

“‘The Lord hath afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger,’” groaned the Covenanter. “’He hath made my strength to fall; the Lord hath delivered me into their hands, from whom I am not able to rise up.’”

“Aye!” whimpered a wounded man who lay partly across the Borderer’s legs. “‘The Lord was as an enemy; He hath swallowed up Israel.’  And I’m thinkin’, ’gin He send nae help, and that sune, we’re no muckle better than deid men.  Eh! weary fa’ the day I left my ain pleugh stilts, an’ my ain fireside.”