"Ye kenna me, John Burnet, but weel ken I you. Often in the auld days your father and me had gey ploys hunting and fechting roond a' the muirs o' Tweed. He was a guid man, was Gilbert, and I hear he had glimpses o' grace in the hinner end."
"Maybe," said I, being in perplexity, for from the grace that he spoke of, my father had ever been far.
"Ay, and I was sair vexed I saw him so little. For he had to bide at hame for the last years, and I was aye busied wi' other work. Yeddie o' the Linns was never an idle man, and less than ever in thae days."
At the mention of his name a flood of recollection came in upon me. I minded how I had heard of the son of Lord Fairley, a great soldier who had won high renown in the wars abroad: and how he had returned a melancholy man, weighed down with the grave cares of religion, and gone to the wilds of Tweed to a hut just above the Linns of Talla, where he spent his days in prayer and meditation. The name of Yeddie o' the Linns, as he was called among the shepherds and folk of these parts, became an equivalent for high-hearted devotion. Then when the wars began tales of him grew over the countryside. In stature he was all but gigantic, famed over half the towns of France for feats of strength, and no evil living had impaired his might. So at the outbreak of the persecution he had been a terror to the soldiers who harried these parts. The tale ran of the four men whom he slew single-handed at the Linns, hemming them in a nook of rocks, and how often he had succoured fugitives and prisoners, coming like an old lion from the hills and returning no one knew whither. There was also the tale of his blinding by a chance splinter from a bullet-shot, and how he had lived among the caves and hills, dangerous even in his affliction. Had I but known it, this cave was his finding, and half the retreats in Tweeddale and Clydesdale were known to him. But now he was an old man, who had long left his youth, and his strength had all but gone from him. He sat alone in his great darkness, speaking little to the inmates or the chance comers, save when he knew them for gentlemen of birth; for though he might risk his life for the common people, he had no care to associate with them, being of the old Kirkpatricks of that ilk, as proud a house as is to be found in the land.