Were one of Border birth to quit "sweet Leader Haughs," leaving unnoticed "True Thomas," Thomas of Ercildoune, I do not know how he might again face his fellow Borderers. For, though Thomas may not have been a great man, in the same sense that St. Cuthbert and Lethington were great, yet to most of his countrymen he is better known than either. For one at the present day to whom the name of Cuthbert is familiar, or one to whom "Lethington" conveys any very definite idea, you will find a hundred who take an intelligent interest in Thomas the Rhymer, and who believe with Spottis-woode, who wrote of him early in the seventeenth century: "Sure it is that he did divine and answer true of many things to come." Fact regarding the Rhymer is so vague, and so beautifully blended with fiction, that I doubt if most Borderers do not more than half persuade themselves still to accept as fact much of the fiction that they learned of him in childhood. To Border children, not so very long ago, nothing was more real than the existence of a tree, still alive and growing somewhere about the enchanted land of Eildon, which must necessarily be _the_ Eildon Tree: "Syne he has kissed her rosy lips All underneath the Eildon Tree;" nothing was more certain than that True Thomas, at the call of the Queen of Faëry, rose and obediently followed the hart and the hind into the forest, and returned no more. "First he woxe pale, and then woxe red, Never a word he spake but three;-- 'My sand is run, my thread is spun, This sign regardeth me.'" No spot was looked on, in early youth, with more awe than that Bogle Burn whose stony bed crossed over the St. Boswells and Melrose road in the cheerless hollow beside a gloomy wood; it was here that True Thomas beheld things unseen by mere mortal eye. Who could doubt? Was there not still standing in Earlston the remains of his old tower to confute all scoffers! [Illustration: 0238] "The hare sail kittle on my hearth stane, And there never will be a Laird Learmunt again." And, a hundred years ago and more, did not a hare actually produce its young on the shattered, grass-grown hearth-stone of the Rhymer's dwelling? So everybody believed. But if doubt yet lingered anywhere regarding some portion of True Thomas's story, it was easily set at rest by the words cut on that old stone built into the wall ot the church at Earlston. "Auld Rymer's race Lyes in this place,"