Field Meetings. 89 



promising- non-intrusionist, who g-ifted her kailyai'd as a site for a 

 Free Church when the Duke of Buccleuch had refused a rood of 

 his ample possessions for the purpose, and told his Grace's envoy, 

 who came to buy it of her, that she had " gi'en it to the Lord an 

 oor syne." Carlyle, when a visitor to his wife's relations at the 

 adjacent farm of Templand, made these incidents the subject of 

 some pungent observations concerning what he called " this puddle 

 of a dukery." Noting by the way Grovehill, with its maple tree 

 and its hackney farm, the company drove on to Penpont, and there 

 made a short incursion into the churchyard. Surrounding a 

 stylish, modern church, dating- from the seventies, there are here 

 some curious memorials of a former age. One imposing piece of 

 sepulchral architecture has been erected to commemorate a pre- 

 Reformation ecclesiastic, but it has proved faithless to its trust, 

 for the elaborate epitaph is no longei- decipherable. Arranged 

 along the wall by the gateway are fragments of headstones with 

 more or less grotesque carving upon them. One, which has, no 

 doubt, marked the resting--place of a village blacksmith, is 

 embellished with a hand and hammer, surmounted by a crown, 

 emblematic of the glory to which he has been called, and is 

 inscribed with the motto of his craft — " By hammer in hand all 

 airts do stand." Airts, of course, is a Scotch rendering of arts in 

 the sense of crafts. In this churchyard, also, is the gi'ave of Dr 

 Grierson. Leaving- the tidy and thriving-looking village, Capenoch 

 House next claimed attention, on account of its beautiful sltuatitju 

 on a little plateau, embosomed in wood, no less than from the fact 

 that it is the country seat of Mr Steuart Gladstone, Governor of 

 the Bank of England, and a second cousin of the late illustrious 

 statesman. Looking up Scaur Water, a glimpse is got of 

 Corfardin, now part of the farm of Laight, in which the Ettrick 

 Shepherd sank in a short eig-hteen months the proceeds of the first 

 edition of " The Queen's Wake " His sheep went down by scores 

 of the " trembling," due it is alleged to putting on the land double 

 the stock which it could carr3^ But the shepherd bore his losses 

 lightly. His man would come in broken-hearted with the news 

 that another batch were dead, to find the master at the fiddle, and 

 got for answer to his doleful tale the invitation to sit down and 

 hear him play a spring. The late James Shaw tells in one of his 

 pleasant sketches how Hogg sought a reduction of his rent and 

 was asked by the Duke of Queensberry — '* If I gave you the land 



