passed, in laughing intelligence, from one fair face and manly person to another. "It was as a hunter I first saw you, Walter, from Dryhope Tower," said she; "and he who hunted for a wife, may well hunt for a portion to her children." "If I bring down Gilmanscleugh," replied Wat, laughing, "it will be a higher quarry than the Flower of Yarrow." "You thought not so then, Wat," rejoined she, in the same spirit; "but love giveth way to ambition. That day thou callest Gilmanscleugh thine own, I will busk me again, as I once busked thy bonny bride, and put thy once-cherished Flower of Yarrow in fair competition with the broad acres of Gilmanscleugh. By my troth, thou wouldst be a bold man to prefer the new love to the old." "I would not give thee, woman," rejoined he, "for all Branxholm's wide domains, with the whole of Ettrick Forest to boot; so hold thy peace, and apply thee to thy hussyskep; for, by my sword, we will come home hungry men." And old Wat's horn sounded again among the hills. The signal for starting was well known, and away they dashed down the steep, with that speed which the Borderers always exhibited--a consequence, perhaps, of the habit of getting off with their booty in the fear of a rescue. They were soon out of the sight of the fond dame, who long afterwards sat at the small window on the east side of the tower, listening to the notes of the horn, as they reverberated among the heights, and died away like the parting notes of mountain spirits that seek their dark recesses in the opening morn. A true Borderer's wife, she never feared for the result of an expedition of either hunting or harrying; and, as yet, a prosperous fate, by saving her husband and her six sons from the dangers to which their mode of life exposed them, had visited her with no cause of a wife's sorrow or a mother's affliction. But such was her heroic spirit, that, much as she loved these objects of her affection, she could have acted the Spartan dame over the dead body of the dearest among them, and quelled the bursting heart with the thought that he had died nobly in the vocation to which his fate had called him. It was not that habit had worn out the ordinary solicitude of the female heart; for, if custom had recognised the actions of a rieving female in the affair of moveable property as well as of moveable hearts, we dare to be bold enough to say that Mary Scott would have been as famous as an amazon scaumer, as she was as the Flower of Yarrow. Many an expedition she had planned; and it was often more easy for Harden to satisfy himself as to the number of good cattle he might lodge in the glen, than it was to come up to the expectations of his better half, who, as the ballad says, if he had brought her less than ten, would not have "roosed his braverie." Nor was Harden's wife singular in the possession of these unfeminine feelings of Border heroism; for, as women are generally seen to take on the hues and complexions of the minds of their lords, the