178 THE BORDER ANGLER. 



ing it by the body when of course it made great play. 

 Monnynut-burn comes in a little above Abbey St. 

 Bathan's, and contains considerable store of trout. 

 The angler should always betake himself to such small 

 waters when he finds the larger stream yielding him 

 sport reluctantly. 



Abbey St. Bathan's is a pretty little village, an 

 oasis amongst the desert Lammermoors, deriving its 

 name from an ancient conventual establishment dedi- 

 cated to St. Bothan. It is, as we have said, four miles 

 from the Grant's-House station of the North British 

 railway. Formerly Mattie Pringle's rude little hos- 

 telry there used almost to rival Ellemford, having 

 been indeed, we believe, of older date ; but when she 

 died, her daughter Maggie scarcely kept up the cha- 

 racter of the house, and finally ran off with a soldier 

 or a navvy (how the ways of men and women are 

 the same in the lonely village amongst the hills as in 

 the seething factory-town !) and the licence was with- 

 drawn. It is now, however, again under respectable 

 management there is a cleanly double-bedded room 

 and as to the licence, why, 'tis not far to Dunse. The 

 most picturesque part of the Whitadder is the stretch 

 of four miles below the Abbey. The rugged banks 

 are finely wooded, and at the copper-mines (that 

 metal having been anciently wrought here), the water 

 labours through a rocky channel in one part so con- 

 tracted that it may almost be stepped over, in another 

 boiling out into a " Devil's Cauldron," popularly 

 deemed unfathomable as if the stream born of the 

 hills were making great efforts to break through the 

 iron barrier that prevented its descent into the plain 



