forth to the woods around the Hermitage, where Walter was to choose the fatal

tree.

"Now a deep mist covered the face of the earth, and they could perceive no object at the distance of half a bow-shot before them; and ere he had approached the wood where he was to carry his merciless project into execution—

"'The wood comes towards us!' exclaimed one of his followers.

"'What!—the wood comes!' cried Soulis, and his cheek became pale, and he thought on the words of the demon—'Beware of a coming wood!'—and, for a time, their remembrance, and the forest that seemed to advance before him, deprived his arm of strength, and his mind of resolution, and before his heart recovered, the followers of the house of Branxholm, to the number of fourscore, each bearing a tall branch of a rowan-tree in their hands,[11] as a charm against his sorcery, perceived, and raising a loud shout, surrounded him.

"The cords with which the arms of Marion and Walter were bound were instantly cut asunder. But, although the odds against him were as twenty to one, the daring Soulis defied them all. Yea, when his followers were overpowered, his single arm dealt death around.

"Now, there was not a day passed that complaints were not brought to King Robert, from those residing on the Borders, against Lord Soulis, for his lawless oppression, his cruelty, and his wizard-craft. And, one day, there came before the monarch, one after another, some complaining that he had brought diseases on their cattle, or destroyed their houses by fire, and a third, that he had stolen away the fair bride of Branxholm's heir, and they stood before the king, and begged to know what should be done with him. Now, the king was wearied with their importunities and complaints, and he exclaimed, peevishly and unthinkingly, 'boil him, if you please, but let me hear no more about him.' But,

and, when the enemies of Soulis heard these words from the lips of the king, they hastened away to put them in execution; and with them they took a wise man, one who was learned in breaking the spells of sorcery,[12] and with him he carried a scroll, on which was written the secret wisdom of Michael the Wizard; and they arrived before Hermitage Castle, while its lord was contending single-handed against the retainers of Branxholm, and their swords were blunted on his buckler, and his body received no wounds. They struck him to the ground with their lances; and they endeavoured to bind his hands and his feat with cords, but his spells snapped them asunder as threads.

"'Wrap him in lead,' cried the wise man, 'and boil him therewith, according to the command of the king, for water and hempen cords have no power over his sorcery.'

"Many ran towards the castle, and they tore the lead from the turrets, and they held down the sorcerer, and rolled the sheets around him in many folds, till he was powerless as a child, and the foam fell from his lips in the impotency of his rage. Others procured a caldron, in which it was said many of his incantations were performed, and the cry was raised—

"'Boil him on the Nine-stane rig!'

"And they bore him to where the stones of the Druids are to be seen till this day, and the two stones are yet pointed out from which the caldron was suspended. They kindled piles of faggots beneath it, and they bent the living body of Soulis within the lead; and thrust it into the caldron, and, as the flames arose, the flesh and the bones of the wizard were consumed in the boiling lead. Such was the doom of Soulis.

"The king sent messengers to prevent his hasty words being carried into execution, but they arrived too late.

"In a few weeks there was mirth, and music, and a marriage feast in the bowers of Branxholm, and fair Marion was the bride."

HARDEN'S REVENGE.

From a state of high civilisation, it is curious to look back upon the manners and modes of life of our ancestors of barbarous times; and the contrast never can be presented in stronger hues than in the picture of the lives of the old Borderers, who so completely realised Hobbes' theory of the beginning of society (fighting and stealing for their daily bread), and that of the quiet, sedate men of industry and peace of these days, whose blood never rises beyond the degree of the heat of a money-making ambition. A shiver comes over us, when we read of the son killed in a feud, carried in to his mother a corpse; of the father of a family, and the laird of many broad acres, laid before his weeping wife and children, the dead victim of a strife with his next neighbour; of families rendered houseless and homeless, often by a marauding kinsman; of the never-ceasing turmoil, strife, cruelty, and revenge, of the whole inhabitants of that distracted part of our country. We read, pause, tremble, and hug ourselves in the happy thought that we have been born in more auspicious times, when the sword is turned into the ploughshare, the castle into the granary, and the fire of enmity softened and changed into the fervour of love and friendship. Yet, alas! if we carry our thoughts farther, how little may we have to felicitate ourselves on in the pictured contrast? Rudeness has its evils; but is civilisation without them? If the household of the Border chief was begirt with dangers of rieving and spoliation, the domestic lares kept it free from the inebriated and demoralised son, whom the genius of civilisation sends from the city haunts of pollution, to lift his hand against his parent. If the ingenium perfervidum, of a roving life carried the husband from the arms of the wife, perhaps to be brought home a corpse, she seldom witnessed in him the victim of any of the thousand civilised crimes which render the common thief, the fraudulent bankrupt, the swindler, the gambler, the disloyal-spouse, the drunkard, worse than dead to her. If a well-directed revenge might deprive the inmates of the turret of a rude home, the strength was, at least, free from the inroads of the messenger or poinder, whose warrant has a crueller edge than the falchion of an enemy. We advocate not the cause of robbery, though dignified by the name of war or revenge, or coloured by the hues of a chivalric spirit of daring; but, when we look around us, and see how much civilisation has accomplished for our bodies and our intellects, and how little for our hearts or our morals, we hesitate to condemn our ancestors for crimes which they were taught to believe as virtues, to attribute to them an unhappiness which they viewed as the mere chance of war, and to laud the civilised doings of our own times, when the criminal has not the excuse of a want of proper education to palliate his offences against the laws of his country. We are led into these remarks by some rising reminiscences of the doings of old Wat Scott of Harden, the most gnarled, most crooked, and sturdiest stem of the tree of that old family. He lived in the fifteenth century, the hottest period of Border warfare, and occupied the old seat of the family, Harden Castle—a place of considerable strength, situated on the beetling brink of a dark and precipitous dell, not far from the river Borthwick, and facing a small rivulet which brawled past to meet the larger stream. The place was suitable to the castle and its possessor; for the stronghold contained in security the sturdy riever, and the glen was a species of massy more for the cattle which he