Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/199

Rh It comes to my memory like a dream—for I was but a boy then groping trouts in Ellenwater—that it was on such a day, some fifty years ago, that the Bonnie Babie Allan, of Saint Bees, was wrecked on that rock, o'er the top of which the tide is whirling and boiling—and the father and three brethren of Richard Faulder were drowned. How can I forget such a sea! It leaped on the shore, among these shells and pebbles, as high as the mast of a brig; and threw its foam as far as the corn-ricks of Walter Selby's stackyard—and that's a good half-mile."

"Ise warrant," interrupted a squat and demure old man, whose speech was a singular mixture of Cumbrian English and Border Scotch—"Ise warrant, Willie, your memory will be rifer o' the loss of the Lovely Lass, of Annanwater, who whomel'd, keel upward, on the hip of the Mermaid rock, and spilt her wameful of rare brandy into the thankless Solway. Faith, mickle good liquor has been thrown into that punchbowl; but fiend a drop of grog was ever made out of such a thriftless basin. It will aiblens be long afore such a gudesend comes to our coast again. There was Saunders Macmichael was drunk between yule and yule—forbye"

"Wae's me, well may I remember that duleful day," interrupted the third bandsman; "it cost me a fair son—my youngest, and my best. I had seven once—alas, what have I now! Three were devoured by that false and unstable water, three perished by the sharp swords of those Highland invaders who slew so many of the gallant Dacres of Clifton and Carlisle; but the Cumberland ravens had their revenge!—I mind the head and lang yellow hair of him who slew my son hanging over the Scottish gate of Carlisle. Ay, I was avenged no doubt. But the son I have left has disgraced for ever our pure blood by wedding a border Gordon, with as mickle gipsy blood in her veins as would make plebeians of all the Howards and the Percies. I would rather have stretched him in the church-ground of Allanbay, with the mark of a Hielandman's brand on his brow, as was the lot of his brave brothers—or gathered his body from among these rocks, as I did those of my other children! But oh, sirs, when did man witness so fearful a coming on as yon dark sky forebodes?"

While this conversation went on, the clouds had assembled on the summits of the Scottish and Cumbrian