People up here will complain if I do not tell how I found the farmer of Green Brae’s fifty pounds.  It is one of the best-remembered incidents of the flood, and happened shortly after I got out of the cornfield.  A house rose suddenly before me, and I was hastening to it when as suddenly three of its walls fell.  Before my mind could give a meaning to what my eyes told it, the water that had brought down the house had lifted me off my feet and flung me among waves.  That would have been the last of the dominie had I not struck against a chest, then half-way on its voyage to the sea.  I think the lid gave way tinder me; but that is surmise, for from the time the house fell till I was on the river in a kist that was like to be my coffin, is almost a blank.  After what may have been but a short journey, though I had time in it to say my prayers twice, we stopped, jammed among fallen trees; and seeing a bank within reach, I tried to creep up it.  In this there would have been little difficulty had not the contents of the kist caught in my feet and held on to them, like living things afraid of being left behind.  I let down my hands to disentangle my feet, but failed; and then, grown desperate, I succeeded in reaching firm ground, dragging I knew not what after me.  It proved to be a pillow-slip.  Green Brae still shudders when I tell him that my first impulse was to leave the pillow-slip unopened.  However, I ripped it up, for to undo the wet strings that had ravelled round my feet would have wearied even a man with a needle to pick open the knots; and among broken gimlets, the head of a grape, and other things no beggar would have stolen, I found a tin canister containing fifty pounds.  Waster Lunny says that this should have made a religious man of Green Brae, and it did to this extent, that he called the fall of the cotter’s house providential.  Otherwise the cotter, at whose expense it may be said the money was found, remains the more religious man of the two.

At last I came to the Kelpie’s brig, and I could have wept in joy (and might have been better employed), when, like everything I saw on that journey, it broke suddenly through the mist, and seemed to run at me like a living monster.  Next moment I ran back, for as I stepped upon the bridge I saw that I had been about to walk into the air.  What was left of the Kelpie’s brig ended in mid-stream.  Instead of thanking God for the light without which I should have gone abruptly to my death, I sat down miserable and hopeless.

Presently I was up and trudging to the Loups of Malcolm.  At the Loups the river runs narrow and deep between cliffs, and the spot is so called because one Malcolm jumped across it when pursued by wolves.  Next day he returned boastfully to look at his jump, and gazing at it turned dizzy and fell into the river.  Since that time chains have been hung across the Loups to reduce the distance between the farms of Carwhimple and Keep-What-You-Can from a mile to a hundred yards.  You must cross the chains on your breast.  They were suspended there by Rob Angus, who was also the first to breast them.