134 THE BORDER ANGLER. 



repay careful fishing. The Leader is a stream ex- 

 ceedingly well suited for the use of the minnow. Near 

 St. Leonard's the Boon-water comes in from the east, 

 and although but a small stream, it contains plenty of 

 good-sized trout. Two of the streams which unite to 

 form it, Blyth-water and the Boondreigh, come rapidly 

 down from the Lammermoors, while another oozes out 

 from the moors of Gordon, and has pools in which 

 there are trout s of large size. 



This part of the Leader can of course be very con- 

 veniently fished from Lauder, which is a small old 

 " burrows- toon," with a comfortable inn. Over Lauder 

 Brig, the Scotch Barons on one occasion hanged, in 

 their rough way, all King James the Third's favourites, 

 because his Majesty took more delight in music and 

 the fine arts, than in hunting, hawking, and fighting. 

 Such tastes were looked upon as disgraceful in a Scot- 

 tish King ; for although his grandfather was a sweet 

 poet, and wrote The King^s Quhair, he was also a po- 

 litic ruler, and a hard rider of the border nobles and 

 the Highland chiefs, and it was for that that they 

 finally murdered him cruelly at Perth. The high- 

 spirited nobles, who may be pardoned for their con- 

 tempt of science and art, seeing that they were too 

 ignorant to know anything about these things, could 

 not brook that a " mason," as Pitscottie terms one 

 Cochrane an architect, who was made Earl of Mar, 

 should presume to rank with them, — so after a mid- 

 night council in the kirk of Lauder, at which, according 

 to the well-known story of the old Scots historian, the 

 stalwart Earl of Angus undertook to " bell the cat," 

 the favourites were seized, and as we have said, hung 



