“Her ear, all anxious, caught the wailing sound:
With trembling haste, the youthful matron flew,
And from the hurried heaps an infant drew.
Of milder mood the gentle captive grew,
Nor loved the scenes that scared his infant view,
He lived o'er Yarrow's Flower to shed the tear,
To strew the holly-leaves o'er Harden's bier.
He, nameless as the race from which he sprung,
Saved other names, and left his own unsung.”
Work and pleasure were sometimes mingled in those royal expeditions called a chase, which had so little to distinguish them from regular Border forays. Law and no law were so curiously tangled together that each bore nearly the same outward features as the other—features especially romantic, which both have now equally lost. Ettrick Forest, now a mountainous range of sheep-walks, was anciently a royal pleasure-ground. The hunting was an affair of national importance, and in 1528 James V. of Scotland “made proclamation to all lords, barons, gentlemen, landward-men, and freeholders to pass with the king where he pleased, to danton the thieves of Teviotdale, Annandale, and Liddesdale (we have heard this expression before in another mouth), and other parts of that country, and also warned all gentlemen that had good dogs to bring them, that he might hunt in the said country as he pleased.”