struck; and in a short time the extraordinary scene was witnessed of a whole family leaving the home of their fathers on a quarter-of-an-hour's notice, and wandering away to beg a habitation and a meal from those who were their dependants. Scott's wife had in her arms a sucking child, and three other children held by her garments, and cried bitterly as they passed on through the fierce troop, who looked the daggers of a disappointed revenge. A sister of his wife's tended a sickly son of Scott's, who was borne forth on a board carried by two of his retainers; and there was seen, hobbling along, with a long piked staff in her hand, the laird's mother, who had gone to Gilmanscleugh sixty years before, and born in it seven sons and three daughters. Then came Scott himself, with the keys in his hand, at the sight of whom Harden's sons moved involuntarily forward, as the instinctive desire of revenge for a moment overcame the command of their father. The keys were handed forth in dead silence; and the servants of the ejected laird wiped their eyes as they beheld the melancholy scene. They wandered slowly and reluctantly away. Harden looked back as the last of them were disappearing in the wood. "Revenge enough," he muttered--"revenge enough, and to spare." He then entered and took possession of the tower, in which he left as many of his men as were sufficient to guard it. He then returned with his sons and a part of his troop to Harden, where he found Mary Scott still sitting by the side of her dead son, in conformity with a custom among the Borderers, derived from the land of Odin, that the corpse of a murdered relative should not be committed to the earth till his death was avenged. She looked up in the face of Harden as he entered, and the blue eye of the Flower of Yarrow searched wistfully for tokens of a deed of stern retribution. Such is the power of custom and education, that one of the fairest of women, who, if she had lived in the nineteenth century, might have been a Lady Fanny, and shrunk, according to fashion, from the sight of a murdered worm, deemed it necessary, from duty, and felt it as consonant to the feelings of her sex, to look her disappointment at not observing, on the clothes or arms of her husband and sons, the signs of a wrong righted by blood. "Is it thus that Harden comes, with bright steel and unsullied clothes, from the house of the murderer of his fairest son?" cried she. "Look at that corpse, and blush deep as the crimson that dyes the lily-lire of our boy. Is there no vengeance, Walter? Is there no satisfaction, my sons?" "Whether, Mary," replied Harden, "would you accept a charter to the lands of Gilmanscleugh to Harden and his heirs for ever, or the life's blood of its master, as a satisfaction for the death of our boy who lies there, killed by his hand?"