Where mass was said and matins, softly sung, Were borne in fitful swell across the Loch; And full of simple vision, there they saw In Kirk and Quire, the brier and red rose, That fondly meet and twin'd o'er lover's graves, Who fled o' night through moor up Black Cleuch heights Pass'd through the horror of the mortal fight, Where Margaret kiss'd a father's ruddy wounds." {297}The ballad of the Douglas tragedy is known to everyone; it need not be quoted. [Illustration: 0317] This is the kirk where the lovers lie buried, almost within distant sight of the ancient tower from which they had fled, and whose ruins are still to be seen near Blackhouse, on the Douglas Burn. The Douglas stones, which, tradition tells us, mark the spot where Lady Margaret's seven brothers fell under the sword of her lover, are out high on the moor: but there are eleven, not seven, stones, though only three are left standing. It was at Blackhouse, one may remember, that Sir Walter first made the acquaintance of Willie Laidlaw, whose father was tenant of the farm. James Hogg was shepherd here from 1790 to 1800, but he had left before Sir Walter's visit, though the two met very shortly after. It was whilst Hogg was in service here that there came the tremendous snow storm of 1794, of which he gave so vivid a description in Blackwood's Magazine of July, 1819. There are now no remains of the chapel of St. Mary; "O lone St. Mary of the waves, In ruin lies thine ancient aisle." {298}It was destroyed about the year 1557, and was never rebuilt. A Cranstoun, flying from the Scotts, sought sanctuary in the holy building, and the Scotts, heedless of the terrors of excommunication, burnt it down. "They burned the Chapel for very rage," says The Lay, because Cranstoun escaped them. The churchyard is little used now, but a few privileged families do still, I understand, bury their dead in that quiet spot. It is an enviable place in which to lie at rest, where the lark sings high in air, and the free wind comes soughing over the hill. Near to the burial ground is the mound called Binram's Coise, the grave, they say, of a wizard priest, whose bones might not find rest in hallowed ground. "Strange stories linger'd in those lonely glens,-- Of that weird eve when wizard Binram old, Was laid in drear unrest, beyond hallow'd ground; How, at bell-tolling by no mortal hand, And voices saying words which no man knew, There rose such shrieks from low depths of the lake, And such wild echoes from the darken'd hill, That holy men fled from the scant fill'd grave, And left bare buried that unholy priest."