who held in fee from Scott's ancestors, the Knights. of Harden and Oakwood, until their own extravagance and the pacification of the Borders reduced them to the occupation of shepherds. In "The Fray of Elibank," Hogg celebrates his redoubted ancestor the Wild Boar of Fauldshope, chief champion of that Harden who was eldest son of Mary Scott, the famous Flower of Yarrow; and records not without pride, that several of the wives of Fauldshope were accounted rank witches, the most notable being Lucky Hogg, who turned Michael Scott himself into a hare, and baited all his own dogs upon him, so that he escaped with difficulty; but he took therefor a terrible revenge, as told by Hogg in a Note to The Queen's Wake," in accordance with the popular tradition and correction of Sir Walter Scott. In the "Pilgrims of the Sun" he bedevils viking Haug into Hugo of Norroway, a pious and peaceful minstrel, who marries Mary Lee of Carelha', and is an utterly impossible milksop :—

"For he loved not the field of foray and scathe,

66

Nor the bow, nor the shield, nor the sword of death;
But he tuned his harp in the wild unseen,

And he reared his flocks on the mountain green."

For which damnable namby-pamby defamation of old Norse and Border character, and that in an ancestor of his own, it has doubtless fared full hard with the poor shepherd's wraith if ever it forgathered with that of grim Haug or the Wild Boar of Fauldshope. His mother was of the Laidlaws of Phaup and Craik, a woman of strong natural talents and humour, and remarkable for her knowledge of Border

lore, in ballads, songs, and traditions, so that her cottage was a favourite resort of the shepherds of Ettrick and Yarrow. In the "Shepherd's Calendar,” he celebrates one of her ancestors, Will o' Phaup, "one of the genuine Laidlaws of Craik," a famous runner, fighter, and good fellow, and the last man of that wild region who was on intimate terms with the fairies. The father, about the time of his marriage, having saved a considerable sum of money, took a lease of the farms of Ettrick House and Ettrick Hall, and commenced dealing in sheep. A sudden fall in the price of these, and the absconding of his principal debtor, ruined him when our Hogg was in his sixth year; everything was sold by auction, and the family was turned out of doors without a farthing in the world. A good man, Brydon of Crosslee, had compassion, took a short lease of the Ettrick House, made the father his shepherd there, and was kind to them all till the day of his death. Hogg had attended school a short time; had the honour of heading a class that read the shorter catechism and the Proverbs of Solomon. But he had now to help earn his living, and at Whitsuntide, when he was seven, was hired by a neighbouring farmer to herd a few cows; his wages for the half-year being a ewe lamb and a pair of new shoes. He records: "Even at that early age my fancy seems to have been a hard neighbour for both judgment and memory. I was wont to strip off my clothes, and run races against time, or rather against myself; and, in the course of these exploits, which I accomplished much to my own admiration, I first lost my plaid, then my bonnet, then my coat, and finally my hosen ;

for, as for shoes, I had none. In that naked state did I herd for several days, till a shepherd and maid-servant were sent to the hills to look for them, and found them all." The winter quarter he was sent to school again, got into the class that read the Bible, and tried at writing copy lines of text in inchlong letters. This finished his schooling, of which he had about half a year in all. His real education, apart from mechanical reading and writing, was due to his mother's Border lore and his pastoral life; and these served him well in the future, far better, indeed, than what is called a good commercial or even classical training in a town would probably have done. He went back in spring to herding cows, the lowest of rural occupations, and was engaged in it several years under sundry masters, till he attained the honour of keeping sheep. Here is one little bit of childish romance in his own words: "It will scarcely be believed that at so early an age I should have been an admirer of the other sex. It is nevertheless strictly true. Indeed I have liked the women a great deal better than the men ever since I remember. But that summer, when only eight years of age, I was sent out to a height called Broad-heads with a rosy-cheeked maiden to herd a flock of new-weaned lambs, and I had my mischievous cows to herd besides. But, as she had no dog and I had an excellent one, I was ordered to keep close by her. Never was a master's orders better obeyed. Day after day I herded the cows and the lambs both, and Betty had nothing to do but sit and sew. Then we dined together every day at a well near to the Shielsike head, and after

dinner I laid my head down on her lap, covered her bare feet with my plaid, and pretended to fall sound asleep. One day I heard her say to herself, 'Poor little laddie! he's just tired to death,' and then I wept till I was afraid she would feel the warm tears trickling on her knee. I wished my master, who was a handsome young man, would fall in love with her and marry her, wondering how he could be so blind and stupid as not to do it. But I thought if I were he, I would know well what to do."

He thinks that he changed masters so often because he was yearly growing stronger, and thus fit for harder tasks and higher wage; he was always recommended from one to the other, especially for his inoffensive behaviour. "This character, which I some way or other got at my very first outset, has in some degree attended me ever since, and has certainly been of utility to me; yet, though Solomon avers, that 'a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,' I declare that I have never been so much benefited by mine, but that I would have chosen the latter by many degrees." He had sometimes very hard usage, and was nearly exhausted by hunger and fatigue. Every small pittance of wage he took to his parents, who in return clothed him as they could. His only book was the Bible: the metrical version of the Psalms at the end he nearly learned by heart, and always liked. When fourteen he managed to save five shillings and buy a fiddle, which occupied all his leisure hours, and was his favourite amusement ever after. Sleeping always in stables or cow-houses, his sawing at night usually disturbed nobody but himself and the quadrupeds,

"whom I believed to be greatly delighted with my strains. At all events, they never complained, which the biped part of my neighbours did frequently, to my pity and utter indignation." At length, having passed the stage of farm drudge of all work, he arrived at the dignity of shepherd to Laidlaw of Willenslee, and here, in his eighteenth year, got his first perusal of Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd" and Blind Harry's "Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace," as modernised by Hamilton of Gilbertfield; both, until recently, almost as common in the cottages of the Scottish peasantry as the Bible itself. He was immoderately fond of them, but regretted deeply that they were not in prose, so as to be more intelligible, or even in the metre of the Psalms. In fact, he had nearly lost what little power of reading he had acquired—the Scottish dialect quite confounded him; so that before he got to the end of a line, he had generally lost the rhyme of the preceding; "and if I came to a triplet, a thing of which I had no conception, I commonly read to the foot of the page without perceiving that I had lost the rhyme altogether. I thought the author had been straitened for rhymes, and had just made a part of it do as well as he could without them. Thus, after I got through both works, I found myself much in the same predicament with the man of Eskdalemuir, who had borrowed Bailey's Dictionary from his neighbour. On returning it, the lender asked him what he thought of it. 'I dinna ken, man,' replied he; ‘I have read it all through, but canna say that I understand it; it is the most confused book that ever I saw in my life!' . . . Mrs. Laidlaw also gave me