We crossed the lovely burn of Powsail, which is the most beautiful of all Tweedside burns, since the water is like sapphire and emerald and topaz, flashing in every ray like myriad jewels. Here we watered our horses, and once more took the hills. And now we were on the wild ridge of upland which heads the glens of Stanhope and Hopecarton and Polmood, the watershed ’twixt the vales of Tweed and Yarrow. Thence the sight is scarce to be matched to my knowledge in the south country of Scotland. An endless stretching of hills, shoulder rising o’er shoulder, while ever and again some giant lifts himself clean above his fellows, and all the while in the glen at our feet Tweed winding and murmuring. I asked Nicol what was the purpose of our journey, for this was by no means the shortest way to Douglasdale and Smitwood. He answered that to go straight to our destination would be to run our heads into the lion’s mouth. He purposed that we should go up Tweed to a hiding-place which he knew of on the Cor Water, and then make over by the upper waters of the Clyde and the Abington moors to the house of Smitwood. These were the more deserted and least accessible places, whereas the villages and lowlands around the skirts of the hills were watched like the High Street of Edinburgh. In a little we passed the wild trough where the Stanhope Burn flows toward Tweed. It was now drawing toward the darkening, and the deep, black glen seemed dark as the nether pit. Had we not had a guide to whom the place was familiar as his own doorstep, we should soon have been floundering over some craig. As it was, our case was not without its danger. It is not a heartening thing to go stumbling on hilltops in the dusk of an April evening, with black, horrific hill-slopes sinking on all sides. Marjory grew frightened, as I knew by the tightened clutch at her horse’s rein, and her ever seeking to draw nearer me, but like the brave lass that she was, she breathed never a word of it. Every now and then an owl would swoop close to our faces, or a great curlew dart out of the night with its shrill scream, and vanish again into the dark. It was an uncanny place at that hour, and one little to be sought by those who love comfort and peace. But the very difficulty of the way gladdened us, for it gave us assurance that we would be unmolested by wayfaring dragoons. By and by stars came out and the moon rose, glorious and full as on the night before, when I had ridden from Leith. Then it served to light my course to Dawyck, now to guide me from it.