Here Colonel Elliot enters into learning about "Wha dare
meddle wi' me?" a "Liddesdale tune," and in the poem an adaptation, by
Scott, of Satchells' "the trumpets sounded 'Come if ye dare.'"
Satchells makes the trumpets sound when the rescuers bring Kinmont
Willie to the castle-top on the ladder (which they did not), and again
when the rescuers reach the ground by the ladder. They made no use at
all of the ladders, which were too short, and Willie, says the ballad,
lay "in the LOWER prison." They came in and went out by a door; but
the trumpets are not apocryphal. They, and the shortness of the
ladders, are mentioned in a MS. quoted by Scott, and in Birrell's
contemporary Diary, i. p. 57. In the MS. Buccleuch causes the trumpets
to be sounded from below, by a detachment "in the plain field,"
securing the retreat. His motive is to encourage his party, "and to
terrify both castle and town by imagination of a greater force."
Buccleuch again "sounds up his trumpet before taking the river," in the
MS. Colonel Elliot may claim stanza xxxi.
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