Sir Walter Scott
INTRODUCTION
Scottish tradition, I think, in some part of the Border Minstrelsy ascribes to the Clan of Tweedie, a family once stout and warlike, a descent which would not have misbecome a hero of antiquity. A baron, somewhat elderly, we may suppose, had wedded a buxom young lady, and some months after their union he left her to ply the distaff alone in his old tower, among the mountains of the County of Peebles, near the sources of the Tweed. He returned after seven or eight years - no uncommon space for a pilgrimage to Palestine - and found his family had not been lonely in his absence; the lady having been cheered by the arrival of a stranger (of whose approach she could give the best account of any one), who hung on her skirts, and called her mammy, and who was just such as the baron would have longed to call his son, but that he could by no means make his age correspond, according to the doctrine of civilians, with his own departure for Palestine. He applied to his wife, therefore, for the solution of this dilemma. The Lady, after many floods of tears which she had reserved for the occasion, informed the honest gentleman, that walking one day alone by the banks of the infant river, a human form arose from a deep eddy still known and termed Tweed-pool, who deigned to inform her that he was the tutelar genius of the stream, and bon gre mal gre, became the father of the sturdy fellow, whose appearance had so much surprised her husband.
This story, however suitable to Pagan times, would have met with full credence from few of the baron's contemporaries, but the wife was young and beautiful, the husband old and in his dotage. Her family (the Frasers, it is believed) were powerful and warlike, and the baron had had fighting enough in the holy wars. The event was, that he believed or seemed to believe the tale, and remained contented with the child with whom his wife and the Tweed had generously presented him. The only circumstance which preserved the memory of the incident, was that the youth retained the name of Tweed or Tweedie. The baron, meanwhile, could not, as the old Scotch song says 'keep the cradle rowing,' and the Tweed apparently thought one natural son was family enough for a decent Presbyterian lover. So little gall had the baron in his composition, that having bred up the young Tweed as his heir while he lived, he left him in that capacity when he died, and the son of the river-god founded the family of Drummelzier and others from whom have flowed, in the phrase of the Ettrick Shepherd, 'Many a brave fellow and many a bauld feat'.
Note: Border Minstrelsy - The Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto i, stanza 12
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