[Original]
It would be a gratifying thing to prove that the memory of ancient Scandinavian deities has survived the sway of the mediaeval Church and the Kirk of John Knox. But I have not heard that the words occur in documents before the eighteenth century. The town has a site naturally beautiful, as Slitrig, a very rapid stream, here joins Teviot, which, above the mills of Hawick is electro clarior; not of a pure crystal translucency, but of a transparent amber hue.
Slitrig takes its rise on the Windburgh Hill, on the northern side of the Liddesdale watershed, a hill of old the known resort of the Good People, whose piping and revels might often be heard by the solitary shepherd.
[Original]
The rivulet is said to well out from a small, black, fathomless little loch high up on the hill. Here, as all knew, dwelt the Keipic, or other irritable spirit prone to resent human intrusion, and if a stone should chance to be thrown into the depths of the lakelet, resentment was pretty sure to be expressed by a sudden dangerous overflow of water into the burn, whereby destruction would be carried down the valley. That, tradition tells, is how Hawick came to be devastated, and all but swept away, early in the eighteenth century. A shepherd, it was said, had quite accidentally rolled a large stone into the lake, and had thus roused the Spirit of the mountain to ungovernable fury. Leyden thus writes of the tradition:
"From yon green peak, black haunted Slata brings
The gushing torrents of unfathomed springs:
In a dead lake, that ever seems to freeze,