" On another farm all
the sheep perished save one black-faced ewe; and she was not long left
to perpetuate her breed, for dogs hunted her into a loch, and she too
went the way of her fellows.
Amongst other great storms, Hogg also mentions one in this same century,
long remembered as the "Blast o' March." It occurred on a Monday, the
twenty-fourth day of March, and was of singularly short duration,
considering the havoc it wrought. The previous Sunday was so warm that
lassies returning from Yarrow Kirk in the evening took off shoes and
stockings and walked barefoot; the young men cast plaids and coats. To
their unconcealed astonishment, as they sauntered homeward these young
people found that an old shepherd, named Walter Blake, had driven his
entire flock of sheep into a sheltered position by the side of a wood,
near the road. Now, Blake was a deeply religious man, one to whom the
Sabbath was in the strictest sense a holy day, a day too sacred to be
broken in any fashion whatever, except for some extraordinarily powerful
reason. On being asked how it came to pass that he was found thus
following his worldly vocation, to the neglect of church-going, he said
that in the morning he had seen to the northward so ill-looking a
"weather-gaw" that he was convinced a heavy storm was coming, and that
probably before morning there would be a dangerous drift.
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