United States or Norway ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


When the trouble was over, and his few acquaintances were pitying him for the bad attack of jungle-fever that had so pulled him down, Moriarty swore a big oath to himself and went abroad again with Mrs. Reiver till the end of the season, adoring her in a quiet and deferential way as an angel from heaven.

"Ay, but Catharine," replied the glover, "hath a second thou knowest little of: Father Clement has taken the young reiver in hand, and he fears a hundred devils as little as I do a flock of geese." "Father Clement!" said the smith. "You are always making some new saint in this godly city of St. Johnston. Pray, who, for a devil's drubber, may he be?

Whether it was wise policy to hang the reiver who was the terror of the Borders, yet "never molested no Scottis man," it is not necessary to decide. He was a scourge to the English, of whom it was said that there was none from the Scottish Border to Newcastle who did not "pay ane tribute to be free of his cumber."

This man ran a very fairish country-bred, a long, racking high mare with the temper of a fiend, and the paces of an airy wandering seraph a drifty, glidy stretch. The mare was, as a delicate tribute to Mrs. Reiver, called "The Lady Regula Baddun" or for short, Regula Baddun. Shackles' jockey, Brunt, was a quiet, well-behaved boy, but his nerves had been shaken.

Hauksbee was honest honest as her own front teeth and, but for her love of mischief, would have been a woman's woman. There was no honesty about Mrs. Reiver; nothing but selfishness. And at the beginning of the season, poor little Pluffles fell a prey to her. She laid herself out to that end, and who was Pluffles, to resist? He went on trusting to his judgment, and he got judged.

But the biggest trouble Pluffles ever manufactured came about at Simla some years ago, when he was four-and-twenty. He began by trusting to his own judgment, as usual, and the result was that, after a time, he was bound hand and foot to Mrs. Reiver's 'rickshaw wheels. There was nothing good about Mrs. Reiver, unless it was her dress.

He was said to be tightfisted, so probably would be in a mood for revenge, and ready enough to join in any scheme for discovery of the reiver.

Craning my neck forward, I saw under a broadened fringe of moonlight the roan horse with the ruddy-bearded reiver beside him. They had evidently crept through some secret passage that issued into the bottom below me. I was just upon the point of raising the hue and cry on him when an action of his took me by surprise.

Said the Lord: "This minstrel's tale goes with the song the bird sang to me this morning; and therefore am I here thronging to win thy head, rank reiver, and this young man's head, since it may not better be, and let the others go free for this time. Hah! what sayest thou? and thou, youngling?

On April 13, 1596, Walter Scott of Buccleuch made himself an everlasting name by the bloodless rescue of Kinmont Willie, an Armstrong reiver, from the Castle of Carlisle, where he was illegally held by Lord Scrope. The period was notable for the endless raids by the clans on both sides of the Border, celebrated in ballads.