remembrance of Kinmont Willie still rankled in that most unforgiving of
royal breasts.

"How dared you," she imperiously demanded, "undertake an enterprise so
desperate and presumptuous?"

"Dared?" answered Buccleuch; "what is it that a man _dares_ not do?"

Elizabeth turned impetuously to a lord-in-waiting. "With ten thousand
such men," she said, "our brother of Scotland might shake the firmest
throne in Europe."

That Kinmont Willie avenged himself not once, but many times, on those
who had treacherously trapped him and done their best to make him meat
for the greedy English gibbet, is not a matter of surmise, but one of
history. His ride into Carlisle on that bleak March day, and the long
days and dreary nights he spent in chains in the English gaol, were
little likely to engender a gentle and forgiving spirit in the breast of
one of the most fiery of the "minions of the moon." When, in 1600, he
raided Scrope's tenants, they were given good cause to regret the
happenings in which Scrope had taken so prominent a part.

We have no record of the end of Kinmont Willie, and can but hope, for
his sake, that he died the death he would have died--a good horse under
him almost to the end, a good sword in his hand, open sky above him, and
round him the caller breeze that has blown across the Border hills. In a
lonely little graveyard in the Debatable Land, close to the Water of
Sark, and near the March dyke between the two countries, his body is
said to rest. Does there never come a night, when the moon is hidden
behind a dark scud of clouds, and the old reiver, growing restless in