He took three days to consider the alternative proposed to him, but chose life with the large-mouthed lady in the end; and found her, according to the tradition which the poet, her descendant, has transmitted, an excellent wife, with a fine talent for pickling the beef which her husband stole from the herds of his foes.

Meikle-mouthed Meg transmitted a distinct trace of her large mouth to all her descendants, and not least to him who was to use his "meikle" mouth to best advantage as the spokesman of his race.

Rather more than half-way between Auld Wat of Harden's times--i.

e., the middle of the sixteenth century--and those of Sir Walter Scott, poet and novelist, lived Sir Walter's great-grandfather, Walter Scott generally known in Teviotdale by the surname of Beardie, because he would never cut his beard after the banishment of the Stuarts, and who took arms in their cause and lost by his intrigues on their behalf almost all that he had, besides running the greatest risk of being hanged as a traitor.

This was the ancestor of whom Sir Walter speaks in the introduction to the last canto of _Marmion_:-- "And thus my Christmas still I hold, Where my great grandsire came of old, With amber beard and flaxen hair, And reverend apostolic air,-- The feast and holy tide to share, And mix sobriety with wine, And honest mirth with thoughts divine; Small thought was his in after time E'er to be hitch'd into a rhyme, The simple sire could only boast That he was loyal to his cost; The banish'd race of kings revered, And lost his land--but kept his beard." Sir Walter inherited from Beardie that sentimental Stuart bias which his better judgment condemned, but which seemed to be rather part of his blood than of his mind.