of Moffat the coach toiled slowly, many times stopping to breathe the horses; and then it stuck fast. They took the horses out, loaded them with the mails, and guard and driver in company with a solitary passenger started again for Tweedshaws, leading the tired animals. Then the horses stuck, unable to face the deep drifts and the blinding storm. MacGeorge announced his intention of carrying the mailbags; they _must_ be got through. The driver remonstrated. "Better gang back to Moffat," he said. "Gang ye, or bide ye, _I gang on!_" cried MacGeorge. So the horses were turned loose to shift for themselves, and the two men started on their hopeless undertaking, the passenger, on their advice, turning to make his way back to Moffat. That was the last ever seen alive of the two who went forward. Next {374}day, the mail-bags were found beyond the summit of the hill,--the most shelterless spot of the entire road,--hanging to a snow-post, fastened there by numbed hands that too apparently had been bleeding. But of guard and coachman no trace till three days later, when searchers found them, dead, on Mac-George's face "a kind o' a pleasure," said the man who discovered the body in the deep snow. Some such fate as that ever trod here on the heels of foot passengers who wandered from the track during a snow-storm. In his "Strange Adventures of a Phæton," William Black writes of these hills as "a wilderness of heather and wet moss," even in the summer time; and he speaks of the "utter loneliness," the "profound and melancholy stillness." There is no denying that it is lonely, and often profoundly still. And no doubt to many there is monotony in the low, rolling, treeless, benty hills that here are the chief feature in the scenery. But I do not think it is melancholy. The sense of absolute freedom and of boundless space is too great to admit of melancholy creeping in. The feeling, to me at least, is more akin to that one experiences when standing on the deck of a full-rigged ship running down her Easting in "the Roaring Forties," with the wind drumming hard out of the Sou'West. From the haze, angry grey seas come raging on the weather quarter, snarling as they curl over and leap to fling themselves aboard, then, baffled, spew up in seething turmoil from beneath the racing keel, and hurry off to leeward. There you have a plethora of monotony; each hurrying sea is exactly the mate of his fellow that went before him, twin of that which follows after. Day succeeds day without other variety than what may come from the carrying of less or more sail; hour after hour, day after day, the same gigantic albatrosses, with far-stretched motionless wings soar and wheel leisurely over and around the ship, never hasting, never stopping,--unhasting and relentless as Death himself. Monotony absolute and supreme, but a sense of freedom and of boundless space, and no touch of {375}melancholy. So it is here among these rolling hills where the infant Tweed is born. There is