"'He is either himself a devil frae hell,
Or else his mother a witch maun be;
I wadna have ridden that wan water
For a' the gowd in Christentie,'"
cried he, according to the ballad. Was he, one cannot help wondering, ashamed of the English breach of Border law entailed in the matter of Kinmont's capture, and was he in a measure wilfully playing into Buccleuch's hands? If that were the case, he took on himself a heavy risk. Elizabeth was not exactly the kind of Sovereign who would be likely to be tender hearted and to make allowances for slackness in such an affair, nor one with whom her servants might safely take liberties. As safely might the gambolling lamb play pranks with the drowsing wolf.
[Original]
Not far from Longtown, at a place called Dick's Tree, on the farther side of Esk, there still stands the "smiddy" (or smith's shop) where Kinmont's irons were struck off. In one of Sir Walter Scott's M.S. letters of 1826 it is told that: "Tradition preserves the account of the smith's daughter, then a child, how there was a sair clatter at the door about daybreak, and loud crying for the smith; but her father not being on the alert, Buccleueh himself thrust his lance thro' the window, which effectually bestirred him. On looking out, the woman continued, she saw, in the grey of the morning, more gentlemen than she had ever before seen in one place, all on horseback, in armour, and dripping wet—and that Kinmont Willie, who sat woman fashion behind one of them, was the biggest carle she ever saw—and there was much merriment in the company." Except for this event, Dick's Tree is quite uninteresting, and quite unpicturesque; it is merely a cottage like a thousand others to be seen in the Border, possessing no special feature, or even any indication of antiquity.