[Footnote: This superstition continues to prevail, though one would
suppose it must now be antiquated. It is only a year or two since an
itinerant puppet show-man, who, disdaining to acknowledge the
profession of Gines de Passamonte, called himself an artist from
Vauxhall, brought a complaint of a singular nature before the author,
as Sheriff of Selkirkshire. The singular dexterity with which the
show-man had exhibited the machinery of his little stage, had, upon a
Selkirk fair-day, excited the eager curiosity of some mechanics of
Galashiels. These men, from no worse motive that could be discovered
than a thirst after knowledge beyond their sphere, committed a
burglary upon the barn in which the puppets had been consigned to
repose, and carried them off in the nook of their plaids, when
returning from Selkirk to their own village.
"But with the morning cool reflection came."
The party found, however, they could not make Punch dance, and that
the whole troop were equally intractable; they had also, perhaps, some
apprehensions of the Rhadamanth of the district; and, willing to be
quit of their booty, they left the puppets seated in a grove by the
side of the Ettrick, where they were sure to be touched by the first
beams of the rising sun. Here a shepherd, who was on foot with sunrise
to pen his master's sheep on a field of turnips, to his utter
astonishment, saw this train, profusely gay, sitting in the little
grotto.
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