PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 263 
sources of the Tyne, found the heaths round Kielder Castle 
peopled by a race scarcely less savage than the Indians of Cali- 
fornia; and heard with surprise the half naked women chanting 
a wild measure, while the men with brandished dirks danced a 
war danee.” 
It was natural that so remarkable an assertion should arouse 
the attention of the inhabitants of the Border districts, and we 
ourselves took no small pains at the time to discover the origin 
of the story. The reference given by Baron Macaulay for the 
truth of his assertion is to the Journal of Sir Walter Scott’s 
Visit to Alnwick, in 1827, where he was received by the late 
Duke of Northumberland. Referring to a conversation with 
His Grace, Sir Walter says: “ He tells me his people in Kielder 
were all quite wild the first time his father went up to shoot 
there. The women had no other dress than a bedgown and 
petticoat. The men were savage, and could hardly be brought 
to rise from the heath, either through sullenness or fear. They 
sung a wild tune, the burden of which was orsina, orsina, orsina. 
The females sang, the men danced round, and at a certain point 
of the tune they drew their dirks, which they always wore.” 
It is well known that Sir Walter Scott loved to improve any 
story which gave an air of additional romance to his wild border 
districts. The old gipsy king of Yetholm declared he did not - 
recognize his own stories when they came back to him from 
Abbotsford; and we strongly suspect that the late worthy owner 
of Kielder would not have discovered his own plain tale of his 
parent’s first visit to that place under the cloak of romance 
thrown over it by the great novelist. Macaulay loved to make 
a brilliant antithesis, and truth had a bad chance between these 
two great writers of fiction; but Macaulay’s version is the less 
romantic of the two, only that he unfortunately added that it 
was ‘‘ within the memory of persons still living.” Now the late 
Duke of Northumberland was born in 1742, and would probably 
not go up to Kielder to shoot till he was twenty years of age, or 
about 1762 to 1770. Few living witnesses of that period would 
be alive at the time Macaulay wrote. But there was one who 
had reached a patriarchial age, and who had been a landed 
