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‘Ca’ out the kye,” quo’ the village herd, 
As he stood on the knowe ; 
‘Ca’ this ane’s nine, and that ane’s ten, 
And bauld Lord William’s cow.” 
** Ah! by my sooth !” quoth William then, 
** And stands it that way now ! 
When knave and chur] have nine and ten, 
That the Lord has but his cow? 
‘*T swear by the light of the Michaelmas moon, 
And the might of Mary high, 
And by the edge of my broad sword brown, 
They shall soon say Harden’s Aye!” 
A good many of their depredations were doubtless committed in 
this district, and as our friends here naturally looked upon the 
matter from a different point of view, we are not surprised to learn 
that many a one must have taken his last look at the blue Border 
hills from this neighbourhood: and whoever may have given to 
the neighbouring city its title of ‘“‘merrie Carlisle,” it could scarcely, 
I think, have been the mosstrooping Scots, whose heads so often 
adorned its gates and walls. 
In the Ballads, as in a mirror, the picture of those times 
is painted for us with, as Lockhart says, “their stern deep passions 
—their daring adventures and cruel tragedies—their rude wild 
humour, interrupted by hardly a blot of what deserves to be called 
vulgarity.” They are of different characters: some describe 
the great struggles that took place between the rival races, national 
encounters like the famous Hunting of the Cheviot, which ever 
moved Sir Philip Sidney like the sound of a trumpet ; others the 
foray, such as that which Wat of Harden made ; and others again, 
the more homely tender incidents of domestic life. For wild and 
dangerous as their occupations were—rough and rude as their 
mode of living was—stern and cruel as the incidents of their career 
too often were—yet there was, too, another side to it, a tender, 
pathetic, gentle, softer side, which has also found its appropriate 
echo in Border song. There on the one hand on the Borders, 
Amid the Cheviot mountain’s blue, 
struggling with the mists and blasts and storms of their native hills, 
