The family were at home in Bemersyde in the days of Malcolm the Maiden. One of them was condemned to pay a dozen salmon yearly to the monastery of Melrose, for some scathe done to the brethren. It must have been an ill year for the angler when Haig expressed a desire to commute the charge for an equivalent in money as he could not get the fish. There was scarce a Border battle in which the Haigs did not leave a representative on the field of honour. Here, too, befell "the Affliction of Bemersyde," when the laird, after a long fight with a monstrous salmon, lost him in the moment of victory. The head of the fish would not go into the landing net, his last wallop freed him; he was picked up dead, by prowlers,--and he weighed seventy pounds. Probably no salmon so great was ever landed by the rod from Tweed. Only the Keep of the mansion is of great antiquity. It may be worth while to leave the river and climb to Smail-holme 'I'cwer, where Scott's infancy was passed. The tower, standing tall and gaunt above a tarn, is well known from Turner's drawing, and is the scene of Scott's early ballad, _The Eve of St. John_. Perhaps the verses which have lingered longest in my memory are those which tell how "The Baron of Smailholme rose with day, And spurred his charger on, Without stop or stay down the rocky way That leads to Brotherton." {210} [Illustration: 0230] {211}He did not go, as we remember, to Ancrum fight, but he returned with armour sorely dinted, having slain in private quarrel a knight whose cognisance was "A hound in a silver leash bound And his crest was a branch of the yew." And that same eve the dead man was seen with the lady of Smailholme. The story is a version of that ancient tale, the Beresford ghost story, which can be traced from the chronicle of William of Malmesbury to its Irish avatar in the eighteenth century--and later. Do ghosts repeat themselves? It looks like it, for the Irish tale is very well authenticated. It was not actually in the tower, but in the adjacent farmhouse of Sandyknowe, his grandfather's, that Scott, at first a puny child, passed his earliest years, absorbing every ballad and legend that the country people knew, and the story of {212}every battle fought on the wide landscape, from Turn Again to Ancrum Moor. We have reached the most beautiful part ol Tweed, dominated by the triple crest of the pyramidal Eildons, where the river lovingly embraces the woods of Gladswood and Ravens-wood, and the site of Old Melrose, a Celtic foundation of Aidan, while as yet the faith was preached by the Irish mission aries of St. Columba. This is the very garden of Tweed, a vast champaign, from which rise the Eildons, and far away above Rule Water "the stormy skirts of Ruberslaw," with the Lammermuir and Cheviot hills blue and faint on the northern and southern horizons.