Neither does the story itself, upon close examination, contain any thing inconsistent with probability. The towns upon the border, and especially Selkirk and Jedburgh, were inhabited by a race of citizens, who, from the necessity of their situation, and from the nature of their possessions (held by burgage tenure), were inured to the use of arms. Selkirk was a county town, and a royal burgh; and when the array of the kingdom, amounting to no less than one hundred thousand warriors, was marshalled by the royal command, eighty men seems no unreasonable proportion from a place of consequence, lying so very near the scene of action. Neither is it necessary to suppose, literally, that the men of Selkirk were all _souters_. This appellation was obviously bestowed on them, because it was the trade most generally practised in the town, and therefore passed into a general epithet. Even the existence of such a craft, however, is accounted improbable by the learned essayist, who seems hardly to allow, that the Scottish nation was, at that period, acquainted with the art "of accommodating their feet with shoes." And here he attacks us with our own weapons, and wields the tradition of Aberdeen against that of Selkirk. We shall not stop to enquire, in what respect Cromwell's regiment of missionary cobblers deserves, in point of probability, to take precedence of the souters of Selkirk. But, allowing that all the shoemakers in England, with _Praise-the-Lord Barebones_ at their head, had generously combined to instruct the men of Aberdeen in the arts of psalmody and cobbling, it by no means bears upon the present question. If instruction was at all necessary, it must have been in teaching the natives how to make _shoes_, properly so called, in opposition to _brogues_: For there were cordiners in Aberdeen long before Cromwell's visit, and several fell in the battle of the bridge of Dee, as appears from Spalding's _History of the Troubles in Scotland_, Vol. II. p. 140. Now, the "single-soaled shoon," made by the souters of Selkirk, were a sort of brogues, with a single thin soal; the purchaser himself performing the further operation of sewing on another of thick leather. The rude and imperfect state of this manufacture sufficiently evinces the antiquity of the craft. Thus, the profession of the citizens of Selkirk, instead of invalidating, confirms the traditional account of their valour.