Burke and Blare! Still, after the lapse of close on a century their memory is held in execration in the Border, still is their name a kind of vague horror even to those to whom it may convey little else, and who are almost wholly ignorant of what hideous crimes were committed by the pair. It was, of course, not only _dead_ bodies that they took. These they ravished from new made graves; but they took also living men, drugged or filled with drink, and murdered them for the sake of the price their corpses would bring as subjects for dissection by some of the doctors of that day. Hare turned king's evidence. After the trial and execution of his accomplice, he was smuggled away to the United States. There his identity was discovered, and an infuriated mob threw him into a limekiln, where he was badly burned and his eye sight destroyed. After a time, when the rage and horror aroused by his misdeeds might to some extent be supposed likely to have died away, he returned to England, and as late as 1855 he was alive and in London. A blind, white haired, frouzy, ragged old man, led by a dog, used daily to slouch up Oxford Street, turn at the Circus towards Portland Place, post himself near where the Langham Hotel stands, and beg there from charitable passers-by. How many of them would have given, had they known that this old man was Hare, a ruffian stained with the blood of perhaps half a score of victims? How many of them, shrinking aside, would have stepped into the foulest gutter rather than be contaminated by even brushing against the hem of his filthy old garments? Few then knew who he was; but there are men yet alive who may possibly remember having seen him. An eminent London surgeon, who died, comparatively speaking, but the other day, very well remembered, and occasionally spoke of, the grizzly old ruffian who stood, with tapping stick, holding a bowl for alms. The late Mr. Serjeant Ballantine, too, in his _Reminiscences_ describes the appearance of the man. Immediately after passing Ettriekbank, the road, coming {252}suddenly out from a clump of trees, breaks into view of a wide and pleasant valley, with a goodly prospect of wood and heathery hill stretched far to the west and south. Down this valley sweeps the gravelly bed of Ettrick; on its farther bank, on the flat haugh, stand a long line of mills and the station of a branch line of railway. Above, rising abruptly, tier upon tier in cheerful succession, trees and houses that blend into the smiling face of Selkirk. And perhaps it is by reason of the width of the setting in which they are placed, or because down the mighty funnel of the valley comes rushing the west wind that sweeps all smoke away, but somehow it seems that the mills on the haugh below the town give no air of squalor or of dirt to the landscape.