With gushing sound he heard the lake o'erflow.
The mighty torrent, foaming down the hills,
Called, with strong voice, on all her subject rills;
Rocks drove on jagged rocks with thundering sound,
And the red waves, impatient, rent their mound;
On Hawick burst the flood's resistless sway,
Ploughed the paved streets, and tore the walls away,
Floated high roofs, from whelming fabrics torn;
While pillared arches down the wave were borne."
Borthwick Water, too, as well as Slitrig, was famed for its fairies—and for worse than fairies, if one may judge by the name given to a deep pool; the Deil's Pool, it is called, a place to be shunned by youthful fishers. But probably the youthful fisher of the twentieth century cares neither for deil nor for fairy. Higher up the stream than this pool is the Fairy Knowe, where a shepherd was once flung into the flooded burn by the fairies,—at any rate he was carried down the burn one evening, late, and he said it was the fairies, and no other spirits, that had flung him in.