And now we come to a once beautiful stream, of which, in the present condition of its lower stretches, it is not easy to speak with due moderation.
"Deil take the ditty trading loon
Wad gar the water ca' his wheel,
And drift his dyes and poisons down
By fair Tweed side at Ashiesteel."
It is not the Tweed at Ashiesteel, however, that in this instance is injured, but the Gala at Galashiels, and Tweed below that town. "It would," says the Official Report issued in 1906 by H.M. Stationery Office, "be impossible to find a river more grossly polluted than the Gala as it passes through Galashiels,"—a verdict with which no wayfarer along the banks of that dishonoured stream will be inclined to disagree. The grey-blue liquid that sluggishly oozes down the river's bed among stones thick-coated with sewage fungus, is an outrage on nature most saddening to look upon. He does wisely who stands to windward of the abomination. It is true that of late years much has been done, much money spent, in the praiseworthy effort to bring purity into this home of the impure; but to the lay eye improvement is yet barely perceptible. "Fools and bairns," however, they tell us, "should never see half-done work." The filter-beds of the extensive sewage works are said to be not yet in working order, and so one may not despair of even yet living long enough to see Gala as Gala should be.
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In the meantime, and till the entire sewage scheme is in full working order, there are—if one may judge from reports in the daily Press,—a few minor improvements not quite out of reach of the inhabitants. On 15th July, 1912, an evening paper published the account of "another" dead pig which at that date was lying in the river "immediately in front of the main entrance to the Technical College." The carcase, we are told, was "much decomposed, and attracted huge swarms of flies." This paper, in commenting on the corpse of an earlier defunct pig, which a few days before had reposed in the same tomb, remarks that "it has been the custom up to now for all kinds of objectional matter to be deposited on the river banks or thrown into the bed of the river to await the first flood to carry it down to the Tweed."