um actually happened to an antiquary of great learning and
acuteness, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, one of the Barons of the Scottish
Court of Exchequer, and a parliamentary commissioner for arrangement of
the Union between England and Scotland. As many of his writings show,
Sir John was much attached to the study of Scottish antiquities. He had
a small property in Dumfriesshire, near the Roman station on the
hill called Burrenswark. Here he received the distinguished English
antiquarian Roger Gale, and of course conducted him to see this
remarkable spot, where the lords of the world have left such decisive
marks of their martial labours.

An aged shepherd whom they had used as a guide, or who had approached
them from curiosity, listened with mouth agape to the dissertations on
foss and vellum, ports dextra, sinistra, and decumana, which Sir John
Clerk delivered ex cathedra, and his learned visitor listened with the
deference to the dignity of a connoisseur on his own ground. But when
the cicerone proceeded to point out a small hillock near the centre
of the enclosure as the Praetorium, Corydon's patience could hold no
longer, and, like Edie Ochiltree, he forgot all reverence, and broke in
with nearly the same words--"Praetorium here, Praetorium there, I
made the bourock mysell with a flaughter-spade." The effect of this
undeniable evidence on the two lettered sages may be left to the
reader's imagination.

The late excellent and venerable John Clerk of Eldin, the celebrated
author of Naval Tactics, used to tell this story with glee, and being a
younger son of Sir John's was perhaps present on the occasion.

Note D, p. #.--Mr. Rutherfurd's Dream

The legend of Mrs. Grizel Oldbuck was partly taken from an extraordinary
story which happened about seventy years since, in the South of
Scotland, so peculiar in its circumstances that it merits being
mentioned in this place. Mr. Rutherfurd of Bowland, a gentleman
of landed property in the vale of Gala, was prosecuted for a very
considerable sum, the accumulated arrears of teind (or tithe) for
which he was said to be indebted to a noble family, the titulars (lay
impropriators of the tithes). Mr. Rutherfurd was strongly impressed with
the belief that his father had, by a form of process peculiar to the law
of Scotland, purchased these lands from the titular, and therefore that
the present prosecution was groundless. But, after an industrious search
among his father's papers, a