man, he might lie in that peaty grave till his bones bleached, rest in that lonely spot till the last dread trump called him forth to judgment. The day after I had chanced on this strange cavern, I returned with a friend to whom I wanted to show it, and though we knew that we must be often within a few yards of the spot, search as we might we never again found that hole. Was it in some _cache_ such as this--perhaps in this very spot--that Covenanters sometimes lay hid? Here two or three might have lain for days or weeks at a time, sheltered from wind or rain and secure from hostile eyes; it would be warm enough, {371}and the drip of water into it is so slight as to be hardly worth naming. Doubtless if one took careful landmarks it would be easy to find again, once knowledge of its whereabouts was gained. And so the lurking Covenanters would have had small difficulty; but without such landmarks, to find it except by chance seems hopeless. None of the shepherds knew of the hole, save one old man who said he had heard there was some such place. But one might go a hundred times across that moor, passing close to the hidden mouth, and unless the faint tinkle of water betrayed it, or by remote chance one blundered in, its existence would never even be suspected. It is a place worthy to be the abode of the Brown Man of the Muirs; and the district is wild and lonesome enough to breed the most eerie of superstitions. Harking back now to the Tweed,--a little way above the bridge at Tweedsmuir on the right bank there is a huge standing stone, called the Giant's Stone, of which various legends are told. Two other stones lie close at hand, but these appear to be mere ordinary boulders. According to the Statistical Account of the Parish of 1833, this Giant's Stone is the sole survivor of a Druidical Circle; all its fellows were broken up for various purposes, and carted away; and we may be sure it was from no feeling of compunction that even the one was spared. Residents tell us that it was from behind this stone that a wily little archer in days of old sent an arrow into the heart of a giant on the far side of Tweed. The range is considerable; it must have been a glorious fluke. But I rather think the place that is credited with this event, and with the veritable grave of the slain giant, is higher up Tweed, opposite the Hawkshaw burn. Somewhere up this burn stood Hawkshaw Castle or Tower, home of that Porteous who gained unenviable notoriety for his feat of capturing at I alia Moss, with the aid of some of the moss-trooping fraternity, one of Cromwell's outposts, sixteen horse in all, and in cold blood afterwards executing the unfortunate troopers. A contemporary {372}historian relates that: "The greatest releiff at this tyme was by some gentillmen callit moss-trouperis, quha, haiffing quyetlie convenit in threttis and fourties, did cut off numberis of the Englishes, and seased on thair pockettis and horssis." The "pockettis and horssis" were