Armies met again; other battles followed, and for two miserable years did the Scots and English fight hand to hand for the liberty or subjugation of Scotland. Edward at length triumphed, and Wallace became his prisoner. The boy of Ellerslie, he, who in after life thought only to preserve his country from spoliation; who was determined, amid the general defection, the abrogation of laws and customs, and the razing of all monuments of antiquity, still to maintain her independence, was betrayed into Edward's hands, by a false friend, whom he had made acquainted with the place of his retreat. He was carried in chains to London, to be tried as a rebel and a traitor, though he had never made submission, nor sworn fealty to England, and to be executed on Tower Hill.
The old Oak of Ellerslie is still standing, and young children play beneath its shade; the birds fly in and out, and around it the life and business of husbandry proceeds, as if neither grief nor death, had ever visited the beautiful hills and dales that lie around.
More than five centuries have passed away since young Wallace played with his companions beside the tree, and a few short years, subtracted from that period, since he took shelter with many of his playmates, when grown up to manhood, among its ample branches. But though long since barbarously executed, and though his bones might not be laid to rest in the land which he sought to save, he is not forgotten in the hallowed spot--the birth-place of his parents--which he loved above all others. The children of the village are still taught to lisp his name, and are carried to hear of him beneath his own old tree. All his favourite haunts by glen or burn, or up the mountain-side, are fondly traced by the young men and maidens when their work is done. Here, they say, he used to sit and listen to the strain of the pibroch, and from off the margin of the little stream he gathered flowers in his days of childhood. Yonder are the mountains, through the secret passes of which he used to conduct his small company of valiant men, when the storm of war gathered dense and dark, and from which he rushed like a mountain-torrent on the enemies of his country. Close at hand, say they, and extending even to the verge of the common on which stands the village of Ellerslie, are a few trees of the ancient wood, which often served for a hiding-place during his rapid alternations of advance and of retreat, and when in the small beginnings, which suited best with his youth--with the youth, too, of his companions--he gave good earnest of what his single arm might have effected, if secret jealousies and discordant counsels had not undermined his best concerted plans.