By sedge enclosed from every ruffling breeze, The fountains lie; and shuddering peasants shrink To plunge the stone within the fearful brink; For here,'tis said, the fairy hosts convene, With noisy talk, and bustling steps unseen; The hill resounds with strange, unearthly cries; And moaning voices from the waters rise. Nor long the time, if village-saws be true, Since in the deep a hardy peasant threw A pondrous stone; when murmuring from below, With gushing sound he heard the lake o'erflow. The mighty torrent, foaming down the hills, Called, with strong voice, on all her subject rills; Rocks drove on jagged rocks with thundering sound, And the red waves, impatient, rent their mound; On Hawick burst the flood's resistless sway, Ploughed the paved streets, and tore the walls away, Floated high roofs, from whelming fabrics torn; While pillared arches down the wave were borne." Borthwick Water, too, as well as Slitrig, was famed for its fairies--and for worse than fairies, if one may judge by the name given to a deep pool; the Deil's Pool, it is called, a place to be shunned by youthful fishers. But probably the youthful fisher of the twentieth century cares neither for deil nor for fairy. Higher up the stream than this pool is the Fairy Knowe, where a shepherd was once flung into the flooded {191}burn by the fairies,--at any rate he was carried down the burn one evening, late, and he _said_ it was the fairies, and no other spirits, that had flung him in. [Illustration: 0211] One very odd relic hard by Hawick is a mote, or huge tumulus, of the kind so common in Galloway. Probably above it was erected a palisaded wooden fortress, perhaps of the twelfth century. The area, as far as an amateur measurement can determine, is not less than that of the tower of Goldielands, an old keep of the Scotts, some two miles further up the water, almost opposite to the point where Borthwick Water flows {192}into Teviot on the left. [Illustration: 0212]