Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/225

Rh net, the liester, and the fly-hook, it produces abundance of salmon, grilses, herlings, and trouts.

The peasantry are as varied in their character as the district they inhabit. Agriculture and pasturage claim an equal share in the pursuits of almost every individual; and they are distinguished from the people of many other Lowland districts by superior strength, agility, and courage: the free mountain air, gentle labour, and variety of pursuits give a health and activity which fit them for martial exercises, and they have, perhaps, more of a military air about them than the inhabitants of any of the neighbouring vales. Many strange, romantic, and martial stories linger among them; and those who have the good fortune to be admitted to their friendship or their fireside may have their condescension richly repaid by curious oral communications, in which history, true and fabulous, and poetry and superstition, are strangely blended together. The tale of the spirit which for many generations has haunted the castle of Spedlans will have its narrative of ordinary horror accompanied by fairy legends and traditions more romantic in their origin, and more deeply steeped in the dews of superstition.

One fine September morning, for the combined purpose of angling, gathering nuts, and exploring the strongholds of the ancient heroes of Annandale—the Hallidays, the Jardines, the Carlyles, the Bells, and the Irvings—I proceeded up the river bank, and employed my fish-rod with a success which drove me in despair to nut-gathering. It was past midday when I arrived at a fine bold sweep of the stream, where the shade of the bordering groves was invitingly cool and the greensward fresh, soft, and untrodden. The sun was, to use the expression of a Scottish poet, "wading 'mang the mist," or, as a fastidious Englishman would say, "struggling amid drizzly rain," which abated the heat of the luminary, and rendered the grass blade cool and moist. A large oak-tree or two, set down in the random beauty of Nature, adorned the narrow holm, or bordering of greensward, between the wood and the water; while at the extremity of the walk, where the stream was limited by projecting rocks, stood the remains of one of those square peels, or towers of refuge, already alluded to. The building was roofless, and the walls had been lessened in their height by military violence; while from its interior ascended a thin