But there is another tradition in which perhaps Galashiels takes greater pride, the tradition connected with the plum tree in the Town's Arms. (Though what the little foxes are doing at the foot of the tree, and what they have to do with the legend, none can say. Perhaps they are English foxes; and they got the plums--sour enough, as it turned out.) The incident commemorated is said to be this: During one of the invasions of Edward III, a party of his soldiers had taken up their quarters in Galashiels. The country no doubt had been pretty well harried and laid waste--Edward's men had plenty of practice--and they may have been careless, with the carelessness begotten of overconfidence. Anyhow, they straggled through the? woods, looking for wild plums, the story goes--though one would imagine that the only plums they would be likely to find there would be sloes, not a fruit that one would expect to tempt them far afield. But perhaps, as some say, they were robbing an orchard--if there were orchards in Scotland in the fourteenth century. In any case, a party of Scots, either a passing armed band, or, as Galashiels would fain believe, the inhabitants of the town themselves, swearing that they would give the southern swine sourer plums than any that had yet set their teeth on edge, fell on the English, drove them in headlong rout to the banks of Tweed opposite to where Abbotsford now stands--the Englishmen's Dyke, they call the spot--and slew them to a man. "Soor Plums in Galashiels" has for centuries been a favourite air in the town, though the words of the song have perished. Gala as a stream has been badly misused by man--at and below the town poisoned by sewage and mill refuse, above the town overfished, and poached, almost to the extinction of its {241}trout. Matters now, however, are, I believe, vastly improved as regards sport; the Galashiels Angling Association works with & will to make things what they should be in a stream once so famed, and one hears that its efforts are meeting with the success they deserve. But it can never come back to what it must have been "lang syne," say in Sir Thomas Dick Lauder's day. [Illustration: 0261]