roit.

No more, as a civilian, did Andrew Kerr face the Indians. On getting
back to New York in 1764 he was given a commission as ensign in the 1st
battalion of the 42nd Regiment, and in various parts of the world he saw
much service, finally retiring about 1780 with the rank of captain. He
did not wholly, however, sever his connection with the service, for
later, after he had purchased an estate in the Border, and had married,
he became a major in the Dumfries Militia.

It is given to few to pass a youth so stormy as Kerr's, and to end, as
he did, by becoming a peaceful, prosperous Border laird.

BORDER SNOWSTORMS

"St. Agnes' Eve--ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold."

The great round-backed, solemn Border hills, in summer time kindly
sleeping giants, smiling in their sleep, take on another guise when
winter smites with pitiless blast, when

"The sounds that drive wild deer and fox
To shelter in the brake and rocks,"

bellow fearsomely among the crags, and down glen and burn rushes the
White Death, bewildering, blinding, choking, and at the last, perhaps,
with Judas kiss folding in its icy arms some luckless shepherd whom duty
has sent from his warm fireside to the rescue of his master's sheep. You
would not know for the same those hills that so little time gone past
nursed you in their soft embrace. Then, in the warm, sunny days, shadows
of great fleecy clouds chased each other leisurely up the braes through
the bracken and the purpling heather; the burn sang to itself a merry
tune as it tumbled from boulder to boulder, rippling through pools where
the yellow trout lay basking; on the clear air came the call of grouse,
and afar off a solitary raven croaked in the stillness of a sun-steeped
glen. Now the bracken is dead, the bent sodden and chill with November's
sleet; against a background of heavy, leaden-grey sky the heather lies
black as if washed in ink. Across from the wild North Sea comes a wind
thin and nipping, waxing in strength, and with the gathering storm
piping ever more shrilly down the glen, driving before it now a fine,
powdery white dust that chokes nostril and mouth, and blinds the eyes of
those whom necessity compels to be out-doors. It is "an oncome," a
"feeding storm." Thus have begun many of the great snowstorms that from
time t