I had climbed into my saddle, and at that moment an unseen plover wailed through the mist. 'Hark!' cried my companion, lifting a finger. 'Hark to his soul i' torment!' My mare took fright, and made a great spring forward; I let her go, for I was 'gliffed' myself, and right glad was I to reach the road made by human hands that led homeward, for I feared if I stayed on that I too might meet the wraiths of Claverhouse and Lag hunting the moorlands for blessed Master Peden. [Footnote 1: Peden, the Covenanter, was undoubtedly on the Border in the 'killing times,' and is said to have escaped from the hunters when preaching on Peden Pike by intervention of a mist, but as in old maps this rounded hill west of Otterburn is spelt Paden, the derivation seems doubtful. Peden's Cleuch on the north side of Carter seems undoubtedly to have been his refuge.] 'ILL-STEEKIT' EPHRAIM 'About the middle of the night The cocks began to craw: And at the dead hour o' the night The corpse began to thraw.' _Ballad of Young Benjie._ We--that is, the four members of our Oxford reading party--were bathing in a deep pool in many-terraced Tees, and I was seated on a rock's edge, drying in the September sunshine, and quoting from Clough's 'Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich': 'How to the element offering their bodies, down shooting the fall, They mingled themselves with the flood and the force of imperious water,' when from the central black cauldron immediately below me appeared the face of Sandie--our best diver--with a most curiously perturbed expression on his countenance. I had been watching a little circlet of foam that eddied round on the outskirts of the current, and seemed to wink at me with a hint of hidden and evasive mystery. Then it vanished, for Sandie's head had shattered it. 'Hello, Sandie!' I cried to him, 'what's up? It's not cramp, is it?' He climbed out and up to where I sat on the rock above, and shook the water from his hair. 'Ugh!' he said in disgust. 'I've just been to the bottom, and there I swear I came across a drowned body; I felt a corpse and touched long hair. I believe it was a woman's.' He looked at his hands in disgust, and perceptibly shivered. 'Nonsense!' said I. 'It must have been a drowned cow or sheep, or possibly a pony.' 'Go down and look, or rather feel for yourself,' he retorted. 'How deep down was it?' I inquired. 'Twenty feet, perhaps,' he said, 'for it's a deep pool, and I believe the poor thing's tethered--sunk with a stone tied to her feet.' 'Surely not,' I exclaimed, 'for if it was a case of murder it would be known.' 'Go down and see for yourself,' cried Sandie testily. 'I've had enough of it.' Calling our other two companions I told them of Sandie's discovery, and we came to the conclusion that it was our duty to try to verify or disprove Sandie's assertion.