Excerpt from A History of the Border Counties: Roxburgh, Selkirk, Peebles In composing a History of the Border Counties, a writer's first inclination is to produce a book made up largely of legend and tradition, and freely interspersed with citations from the Border Ballads. But, fascinating as is the material thus presented, so long as Sir Walter Scott's 'Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ' with its rich equipment of notes and introduction, is within the reach of every one, a new book of the kind can scarcely be considered necessary; whilst those who seek for a critical study of the ballads will find it ready to their hand in the second volume of the 'History and Poetry of the Scottish Border' by the late Professor Veitch. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.