AYR TO DUMFRIES. 311 



bay, reading most ancient newspapers, and looking^ 

 at Flying Childers, Eclipse, and King Herod — tlie 

 last testimony to its races, whicli have now been dead 

 and buried for more than forty years — on the walls 

 of a coffee-room, beguiled the weary hours, till we 

 could start once more to Dumfries by Newton 

 Stewart, and New Galloway, on that most sodden 

 and " most immemorial day/' 



" The merchant rain, which carries on 

 Kich commerce 'twtxtthe earth and sim," 



was never at rest from sunrise. We went past endless 

 muirs and moss hags full of dark-grey boulders and 

 small lochs, on which wild-ducks were sailing, as if 

 proud of the general suction. Still, after all, there was 

 certain grandeur an>o^it that damp desolation, and 

 when you thought of it in connexion with many a 

 dark episode, Avith the tales which linger still in the 

 western Lowlands, ^^ of the black charger of Claver- 

 house, of the strange encounters with the Evil One, 

 of the cry of the plover and the peewit round the en- 

 campment on the hill-side,^' you might well allow 

 that it was " more instructive than many books.'' 



Cumberland has done much for Galloway stock. 

 It is true that, before George Graham of Riggfoot 

 began to breed them forty years ago, there were good 

 bulls bred in Johnstone, Dumfriesshire, and equally 

 true that he began with a cow from Sproat of Renton, 

 and a bull from James Welch of Deaths ; but still, he 

 was the "Black Booth'"' of Cumberland and the 



