To reach Clearburn Loch, if you start from the Teviot, you must pass
through much of Scott's country and most of Leyden's. I am credibly
informed that persons of culture have forgotten John Leyden. He was a
linguist and a poet, and the friend of Walter Scott, and knew

The mind whose fearless frankness naught could move,
The friendship, like an elder brother's love.

We remember what distant and what deadly shore has Leyden's cold remains,
and people who do not know may not care to be reminded.

Leaving Teviot, with Leyden for a guide, you walk, or drive,

Where Bortha hoarse, that loads the meads with sand,
Rolls her red tide.

Not that it was red when we passed, but _electro purior_.

Through slaty hills whose sides are shagged with thorn,
Where springs, in scattered tufts, the dark green corn,
Towers wood-girt Harden far above the vale.

And very dark green, almost blue, was the corn in September, 1888.
Upwards, always upwards, goes the road till you reach the crest, and
watch far below the wide champaign, like a sea, broken by the shapes of
hills, Windburg and Eildon, and Priesthaughswire, and "the rough skirts
of stormy Ruberslaw," and Penchrise, and the twin Maidens, shaped like
the breasts of Helen. It is an old land, of war, of Otterburn, and
Ancrum, and the Raid of the Fair Dodhead; but the plough has passed over
all but the upper pastoral solitudes. Turning again to the downward
slope you see the loch of Alemoor, small and sullen, with Alewater
feeding it. Nobody knows much about the trout in it. "It is reckoned
the residence of the water-cow," a monster like the Australian bunyip.
There was a water-cow in Scott's loch of Cauldshiels, above Abbotsford.
The water-cow has not lately emerged from Alemoor to attack the casual
angler. You climb again by gentle slopes till you reach a most desolate
tableland. Far beyond it is the round top of Whitecombe, which again
looks down on St. Mary's Loch, and up the Moffat, and across the Meggat
Water; but none of these are within the view. Round are _pastorum loca
vasta_, lands of Buccleugh and Bellenden, Deloraine, Sinton, Headshaw,
and Glack. Deloraine, by the way, is pronounced "Delorran," and perhaps
is named from Orran, the Celtic saint. On the right lies, not far from
the road, a grey sheet of water, and this is Clearburn, where first I met
the Doctor.

The loch, to be plain, is almost unfishable. It is nearly round, and
ever