'Carmichael bade them speak out plainlie, And cloak no cause for ill or good; The other answering him as vainly, Began to reckon kin and blood; He raise, and raxed him where he stood, And bade him match him wi' his marrows; Then Tyndale heard these reason rude, And they let off a flight of arrows.' Again, in _Kinmont Willie_, the flower, with one exception to be named, of the ballads that celebrate the exploits of the 'ruggers and rivers,' the singer lets slip, as it were by accident, that he was of the bold and lawless company that broke Carlisle Castell in time of peace. The old lay tingles and glows with the restless untameable courage, the dramatic fire, the grim humour, and the spirit of good fellowship that were characteristic, along with some less admirable qualities, of the old Borderers. The rage, tempered with a dash of Scots caution, of the Bauld Buccleuch when he heard that his unruly countryman had been taken 'against the truce of border tide' by the 'fause Sakelde and the keen Lord Scroope'; his device for a rescue that while it would set the Kinmont free, would 'neither harm English lad nor lass,' or break the peace between the countries; the keen questionings and adroit replies that passed, like thrust and parry, between the divided bands of the warden's men and Sakelde himself, who met them successively as they crossed the Debateable Land, until it came to the turn of tongue-tied Dickie o' Dryhope, who, having never a word ready, 'thrust the lance through his fause bodie,'--all these are told in the most vigorous and graphic style of rough first-hand narrative. And then the story-teller takes up the parable in his own person, and describes how he and his comrades plunged through the flooded Eden, climbed the bank, and through 'wind and weet and fire and sleet' came beneath the castle wall:-- 'We crept on knees and held our breath, Till we placed the ladders against the wa'; And sae ready was Buccleuch himsel' To mount the first before us a'. He 's ta'en the watchman by the throat, And flung him down upon the lead-- "Had there not been peace between our lands, Upon the other side thou 'dst gaed!"' In the 'inner prison' lay Willie o' Kinmont, like a wolf in a trap, sleeping soft and waking oft, with thoughts of the gallows, on which he was to swing in the morning, and of his wife and bairns and the 'gude fellows' in the Debateable Land he was never to see again. But in an instant, at the hail and sight of his friends, the fearless humour of the Border rider comes back to him; mounted, irons and all, on the shoulders of Red Rowan, 'the starkest man in Teviotdale,' he must first take farewell of his host, Lord Scroope, with a significant promise that he would 'pay him lodging maill when first they met on the border side.'