This man was a shoemaker, John Younger, a very intelligent and worthy person, famous as an angler and writer on angling, who has left an account of the "False Alarm" in his memoirs.

His view was that the people, unlike Edie, had nothing to fight for, that only the rich had any reason to be patriotic, that the French had no quarrel with the poor.

In fact, Mr.Younger was a cosmopolitan democrat, and sneered at the old Border glories of the warlike days.

Probably, however, he would have done his duty, had the enemy landed, and, like Edie, might have remembered the "burns he dandered beside," always with a fishingrod in his hand.
The Editor cannot resist the temptation to add that the patriotic lady mentioned in Scott's note, who "would rather have seen her son dead on that hearth than hear that he had been a horse's length behind his companions," was his paternal great-grandmother, Mrs.
John Lang.

Her husband, who died shortly afterwards, so that she was a widow when Scott conversed with her, chanced to be chief magistrate of Selkirk.