How it may be now, I cannot say, but in the writer's boyhood the memory of these prisoners still lived, and old people told {259}innumerable tales of the strange habits of "thae Frainch." "They made tea oot o' dried whun (furze) blossoms, an' they skinned the very paddas (frogs)," said one old man. The writer of the reminiscences referred to above makes no allusion to "paddas," but he does mention that "a lake in the neighbour hood supplied abundance of very delicate pike." This lake may have been the Haining Loch, a picturesque sheet of water over which, however, there is, or used to be, at times a nasty vegetable scum. "One of the most beautiful and peaceful lakes that ever was seen," is Sir Thomas Dick Lauder's description of it as it was in his day. I think, however, that the French writer probably refers to the Pot Loch, a small and once very deep lochan, or pond, nestling in a hollow at the foot of the pleasant heathery hills on which is now the Selkirk Golf Course. It is a much more likely spot than the Haining for the prisoners to frequent. The former is on the town's property, the latter on an estate in private hands. And in the former there are, or at least there certainly used to be, many pike of no great size. It was here, too, that tradition told us the prisoners went to catch frogs? That Frenchmen in their own land lived chiefly on a diet of frogs was the firm belief of a majority of the town's inhabitants, ("French frogs" of course was a term of contemptuous reproach,) and that the prisoners went to the Pot Loch for any other purpose than to obtain supplies of what seemed to the townsfolk to be a very loathsome dainty, would never occur to them. The fact that the edible frog did not exist there, would make no difference in their belief. That was no difficulty; frogs were frogs all the world over; and frogs of course included toads. The French ate them all. The writer of the reminiscences, M. Doisy de Villargennes, tells us that some of the prisoners were "passionately fond of fishing, and excelled in it,"--national prejudice of course forbids that we should accept the latter part of the statement as correct!--and that they used to fish in Ettrick and {260}Tweed. Part of the former, close to the town, would be within their "bounds," but the Tweed is far outside the mile radius which was their limit of liberty. [Illustration: 0280]