It traverses a ridge and is streaked with slippery beech-roots which like to fling you off your feet, on the one side into a black burn twenty feet below, on the other down a pleasant slope.

The double dykes were built by a farmer fond of his dram, to stop the tongue of a water-kelpie which lived in a pool below and gave him a turn every night he staggered home by shouting, "Drunk again, Peewitbrae!" and announcing, with a smack of the lips, that it had a bed ready for him in the burn.

So Peewitbrae built two parallel dykes two feet apart and two feet high, between which he could walk home like a straight man.

His cunning took the heart out of the brute, and water-kelpies have not been seen near Thrums since about that time.
By day even girls played at palaulays here, and it was a favorite resort of boys, who knew that you were a man when you could stand on both dykes at once.

They also stripped boldly to the skin and then looked doubtfully at the water.