It ran," says Lockhart, "from the precincts of the homestead to near Turn-Again, and has bequeathed the name of _the Doctor's reiding-kame_ to the mass of nobler trees amidst which its dark, straight line can now hardly be traced." I do not think that "the Doctor's redding-kame" now survives {233}as a name, even if the original trees be still to the fore. In any rase they would attract no attention, for what Sir Thomas Dick Lauder says was then "as tame and uninteresting a stretch of ground as could well be met with in any part of the world," is now rich in woods, and everywhere restful and pleasing to the eye--though it may be conceded that Galashiels has stretched a villa-bedecked arm farther up Tweed's left bank than might have been quite acceptable to Sir Walter. At Boldside, of whose "ruined and abandoned churchyard" he writes in his introduction to the _Monastery_, there is now a railway station, and suburban villas, large and small, dot the landscape ever the more plentifully as one approaches that important manufacturing town which a century back was but a tiny village peopled by a few industrious weavers. No longer, I fear, can it be said that Boldside's "scattered and detached groves," combining with "the deep, broad current of the Tweed, wheeling in moonlight round the foot of the steep bank.... fill up the idea which one would form in imagination for a scene that Obcron and Queen Mab might love to revel in." The Fairy Folk have fled from scenes tainted by an atmosphere of railway and modern villa. Even the Water-bull has ceased to shake the hills with his roar around Sir Walter's "small but deep lake" at Cauldshiels. Yet as late as the time of our grandsires people told gravely how, one warm summer's day, a lady and her groom, riding by the sullen shore of this "lochan," ventured a little way from the edge in order to water their thirsty horses, and were immediately engulfed in the Kelpie's insatiable maw. If such a tragedy ever did happen, no doubt the explanation is simple enough. Without any warning the hard upper crust would give way beneath the horses' feet, and, struggling vainly, they would sink in the fathomless, spewing, inky slime below. Once trapped in that, no power on earth could ever bring them out {234}again, dead or alive. A like fate nearly befell the writer when fishing alone one day in a gloomy, forsaken, kelpie-haunted Border hill loch. Dense fog came down, wreathing over the quiet water, hiding the dripping heather and the benty hill. A bird of the bittern kind boomed dismally at intervals, and a snipe bleated. It was a cheerless prospect; and the temperature had fallen with the coming of the fog. But through the mist could be heard the sound of trout rising in the little loch, and one bigger than his fellows persisted in rising far out. The sound was too tempting. The fisher waded out, and still out; and ever the big trout rose, luring him on. Another step, and another; it was no longer stony under foot,