OLD MORTALITY.
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upon this occasion, distinctly heard, and I entertained some alarm that a march-dike, long meditated by the two proprietors whose estates were divided by my favourite brook, was about to be drawn up the glen, in order to substitute its rectilinear deformity for the graceful winding of the natural boundary.[1] As I approached I was agreeably undeceived. An old man was seated upon the monument of the slaughtered presbyterians, and busily employed in deepening, with his chisel, the
- ↑ I deem it fitting that the reader should be apprised, that this limitary boundary between the conterminous heritable property of his honour the Laird of Ganderscleuch, and his honour the Laird of Gusedub, was to have been in fashion an agger or rather murus of uncemented granite, called, by the vulgar, a dry-stane-dike, surmounted, or coped, cespite viridi, i. e. with a sodturf. Truly their honours fell into discord concerning two roods of marshy ground, near the cove called the Bedral's Beild; and the controversy, having some year by-gone been removed from before the judges of the land, (with whom it abode long,) even unto the Great City of London and the Assembly of the Nobles therein, is, as I may say, adhuc in pendente.—J. C.
