CHAPTER XVI.

HEXHAM - THE NORTH TYNE - BORDER-LAND AND ITS SUGGESTIONS - HAWICK - TEVIOTDALE - BIRTH-PLACE OF LEYDEN - MELROSE AND DRYBURGH ABBEYS - ABBOTSFORD: SIR WALTER SCOTT; HOMAGE TO HIS GENIUS - THE FERRY AND THE OAR-GIRL - NEW FARM STEDDINGS - SCENERY OF THE TWEED VALLEY - EDINBURGH AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS.

On Thursday, Sept. 3rd, I left Newcastle, and proceeded first westward to the old town of Hexham, with the view of taking a more central route into Scotland.  Here, too, are the ruins of one of the most ancient of the abbeys.  The parish church wears the wrinkles of as many centuries as the oldest in the land.  Indeed, the town is full of antiquities of different dates and races, - Roman, Scotch, Saxon, Danish and Norman.  They all left the marks of their glaived hands upon it.

From Hexham I faced northward and followed the North Tyne up through a very picturesque and romantic valley, thickly wooded and studded with baronial mansions, parks, castles and residences of gentry, with comfortable farm-houses looking sunny and cheerful on the green hill slopes and on the quiet banks of the river.  I saw fields of wheat quite green, looking as if they needed another month's sun to fit them for harvesting.  Lodged in a little village about eight miles from Hexham.  The next day walked on to the little hamlet of Fallstones, a distance of about twenty miles.  As I ascended the valley, the scene changed rapidly.  The river dwindled to a narrow stream.  The hills that walled it in on either side grew higher and balder, and the clouds lay cold and dank upon their bleak and sullen brows.  The hamlets edged in here and there grew thinner, smaller and shabbier.  The road was barred and gated about once in a mile, to keep cattle and sheep from wandering; there being no fences nor hedges running parallel with it.  In a word, the premonitory symptoms of a bare border-land thickened at every turn.

Another day brought me into the midst of a wild region, which might be called No-man's-land; although most of it belongs to the Duke of Northumberland.  It is all in the solitary grandeur of heather-haired hills, which tinge, with their purple flush, the huge, black-winged clouds that alight upon them.  Only here and there a shepherd's cottage is to be seen half way up the heights, or sheltering itself in a clump of trees in glen or gorge, like a benighted traveller bivouacking for a night in a desert.  Sheep, of the Cheviot breed mostly, are nearly the sole inhabitants and industrials of this mountainous waste.  They climb to the highest peaks and bring down the white wealth of their wool to man.  It was pleasant to see them like walking mites, flecking the dark brows of the mountains.  They made a picture; they made a tableau vivant of the same illustration as Landseer's lamb looking into the grass-covered cannon's mouth.

This is the Border-land!  Here the fiercest antagonisms of hostile nationalities met in deadly conflict.  Fire and blood, rapine and wrath blackened and reddened and ravaged for centuries across this bleak territory.  Robber-chieftains and knighted free-booters carried on their guerilla raids backward and forward, under the counterfeited banner of patriotism.  Scotch and English armies led by kings marched and counter-marched over this sombre boundary.  Never before was there one apparently more insoluble as a barrier between two peoples.  Never before in Christendom was there one that required a longer space of time to melt.  Never before did the fusing of two nationalities encounter more fierce and prolonged opposition.  Did ever patriotism pour out a swifter and deeper tide of chivalrous sentiment against merging one in another? - against uniting two thrones and two peoples in one?  Did patriotism ever fight bloodier battles to prevent such a union, or cling to local sovereignty with a more desperate hold?

This is the Border-land!  Look up the purpled steeps of these heathered hills.  The white lambs are looking, with their soft, meek eyes, into the grass-choked mouths of the rusty and dismantled cannon of the war of nationalities between England and Scotland.  The deed has been consummated.  The valor and patriotism of Wallace and Bruce could not prevent it.  The sheep of English and Scotch shepherds feed side by side on these mountain heights, in spite of Stirling and Bannockburn, of Flodden and Falkirk.  The Iron Horse, bearing the blended arms of the two realms on his shield, walks over those battle-fields by night and day, treading their memories deeper and deeper in the dust.  The lambs are playing in the sun on the boundary line of the two dominions.  Does a Scot of to-day love his native land less than the Campbell clansman or clan-chief in Bruce's time?  Not a whit.  He carries a heartful of its choicest memories with him into all countries of his sojourning.  But there is a larger sentiment that includes all these filial feelings towards his motherland, while it draws additional warmth and strength from them.  It is the sentiment of Imperial Nationality; the feeling of a Briton, that does not extinguish nor absorb, nor compete with, the Scot in his heart; - the feeling that he is a political constituent of a mighty nation, whose feet stand upon all the continents of the earth, while it holds the best islands of the sea in its hands; - the feeling with which he says We with all the millions of a dominion on which the sun never sets, and Our, when he speaks of its grand and common histories, its hopes, prospects, progress, power and aspirations.

There was a Border-land, dark and bloody, between Saxon England and Celtic Wales.  For centuries the red foot-marks of savage conflict scarred and covered its wild waste.  Never before did so small a people make so stout, and desperate and protracted struggle for local independence and isolation.  Never did one produce a more strong-hearted and blind-eyed patriotism, or patriotism more poets to thrill the listeners to their lays with the intoxicating fanaticism of a national sentiment.  On that Border-land the white lambs now lie in the sun.  The Welsh sentiment is as strong as ever in the Snowdon shepherd, and he may not speak a dozen words of the English tongue.  But the Briton lives in his breast.  The feeling of its great meaning surrounds and illumines the inner circles of his local attachment.  He may never have seen a map of the Globe, and never have been outside the wall of the Welsh mountains; but he knows, without geography, who and what Queen Victoria is among the earth's sovereigns, and the length and breadth of her sceptre's reach and rule around the world.

There was a Border-land between Britain and Ireland, blackened and scarred by more burning antagonisms than those that once divided the larger island.  The record of several consecutive centuries is graven deep in it by the brand and bayonet, and by the more incisive teeth-marks of hate.  The slumbering antipathies of race and religion even now crop out here and there, over the unfused boundary, in hissing tongues of flame.  The Briton and the Celt are still struggling for the precedence in the Irishman's breast; but it is not a war of extermination.  His ardent nature is given to martial memories, and all the battles he boasts of are British battles, in which he or his father played the hero number one.  The history of independent Ireland is poor and thin; still he holds it back in his heart, and hesitates to link it with the great annals of the "Saxon" realm, and thus make of both one grand and glorious record, present and future.  He cannot yet make up his mind to say We with all the other English-speaking millions of the empire, as the Scotsman and Welshman have learned and loved to say it.  He cannot as yet say Our with them with such a sentiment of joint-interest, when the histories, hopes, expansion and capacities of that empire unroll their vista before him.  But the rains and the dews of a milder century are falling upon this Border-land.  The lava of spent volcanoes that covered it is taking soil and seed of green vegetation.  The white lambs shall yet lie on it in the sun.

What a volume might be filled with the succinctest history of the Border-lands of Christendom!  France was intersected with them for centuries.  Seemingly they were as implacable and obdurate as any that ever divided the British isle.  Local patriotism wrote poetry and shed blood voluminously to prevent the fusion of these old landmarks of pigmy nationalities.  It took nearly a thousand years to complete the blending; to make the we and the our of one great consolidated empire the largest political sentiment of the men of Normandy, Burgundy or Navarre.  Long and fierce, and seemingly endless was the struggle; but at last, on all those old obstinate boundaries of hostile principalities, the white lambs lay in the sun.

There are Border-lands now in the south and east of Europe foaming and seething with the same antagonisms of race and language; and Christendom is tremulous with their emotion.  It is the same old struggle over again; and yet ninety-nine in a hundred of intelligent and reading people, with the history of British and French Border-lands before them, seem to think that a new and strange thing has happened under the sun.  Full that proportion of our English-speaking race, in both hemispheres, closing the volume of its own annals, have made up their minds to the belief that these Border-lands between German and Magyar, Teuton and Latin, Russ and Pole, bristle with antagonisms the like of which never were subdued, and never ought to be subdued by human means or motives.  To them, naturally, the half century of this hissing and seething, insurrection and repression, is longer than the five hundred years and more it took to fuse into one the nationalities of England and Wales.  What a point of space is a century midway between the ninth and nineteenth!  Few are long-sighted enough in historic vision to touch that point with a cambric needle.  It may seem unfeeling to say it or think it; still it is as true as the plainest history of the last millenium.  There is a patriotism that looks at the future through a gimlet hole, and sees in it but a single star.  That patriotism is a natural, and most popular sentiment.  It was strong in the Welshman's breast a thousand years ago, and in the Scotsman's half that distance back in the past.  But it is a patriotism that has its day and its rule; then both its eyes are opened, and it looks upon the firmament of the future broadside on, and sees a constellation where it once saw and half worshipped a solitary star.  Better to be the part of a great WHOLE than the whole of a little nothing.

These continental Border-lands may see the face of their future history in the mirror of England's annals.  They are quaking now with the impetuous emotions of local nationality.  They are blackened and scarred in the contest for the Welsh and Scotch independence of centuries agone.  But over those boundary wastes the grass shall yet grow soft, fair and green, and there, too, the white lambs shall lie in the sun.

My walk lay over the most inhospitable and unpeopled section I ever saw.  Calling at a station on the railway that passes through it, I was told by the master that the nearest church or chapel was sixteen miles in one direction, and over twenty in another.  It is doubtful if so large a churchless space could be found in Iowa or even Kansas.  I was glad to reach Hawick, a good, solid town but a little way inside of the Scottish border, where I spent the sabbath and the following Monday.  This was a rallying and sallying point in the old Border Wars, and was inundated two or three times by the flux and reflux of this conflict, having been burnt twice, and put under the ordeal of other calamities brought upon it when free-booting was both the business, occupation and pastime of knighted chieftains and their clansmen.  It is now a thrifty, manufacturing town, lying in the trough of the sea, or of the lofty hills that resemble waves hardened to earth in their crests.  Just opposite the Temperance Inn in which I had my quarters, was the Tower Hotel, once a palatial mansion of the Buccleuchs.  There the Duchess of Monmouth used to hold her drawing-rooms in an apartment which many a New England journeyman mechanic would hardly think ample and comfortable enough for his parlor.  There is a curious conical mound in the town, called the Moat-hill, which looks like a great, green carbuncle.  It is thought by some to be a Druidical monument, but is quite involved in a mystery which no one has satisfactorily solved.  It is strange that no persistent and successful effort has been made to let day-light through it.  Some workmen a long time ago undertook to perforate it, but were frightened away by a thunder-storm, which they seemed to take as a reproof and threatened punishment for their profanity.  The great business of Hawick is the manufacture of a woollen fabric called Tweeds.  It came to this name in a singular way.  The clerk of the factory made out an invoice of the first lot to a London house under the name of Twilled goods.  The London man read it Tweeds, instead of Twilled, and ever since they have gone by that title.  As Sir Walter Scott was at that time making the name "Tweed" illustrious, the mistake was a very lucrative one to the manufacturers of the article.  Here, too, in this border town commences the chain of birthplaces of eminent men, who have honored Scotland with their lives and history.  Here was born James Wilson, once the editor of The Economist, who worked his way up, through intermediate positions of public honor and trust, to that of Finance Minister for India, and died at the meridian of his manhood in that country of dearly-bought distinctions.

On Tuesday, Sept. 8th, I commenced my walk northward from this threshold town of Scotland.  Followed down the Teviot to Denholm, the birth-place of the celebrated poet and linguist, Dr. John Leyden, another victim who offered himself a sacrifice to the costly honors and emoluments of East Indian official life.  One great thought fired his soul in all the perils and privations of that deadly climate.  It was to ascend one niche higher in knowledge of oriental tongues than Sir William Jones.  He labored to this end with a desperate assiduity that perhaps was never surpassed or even equalled.  He died hugging the conviction that he had attained it.  This little village was his birthplace.  Here he wrote his first rhymes, and wooed and won the first inspirations of the muse.  His heart, as its last pulses grew weaker and slower, in that far-off heathen land, took on its child-thoughts again and its child-memories; and his last words were about this little, rural hamlet where he was born.  A beautiful monument has been erected to his memory in the centre of the large common around which the village is built.  On each of the four sides of the monument there is a tribute to his name and worth; one from Sir Walter Scott, and one taken from his own poems, entitled "Scenes of my Infancy," a touching appeal to his old friends and neighbors to hold him in kind remembrance.

All this section is as fertile as it can be in the sceneries and historical associations favorable for inspiring a strong-hearted love of country, and for the development of the poetry of romantic patriotism.  It was pleasant to emerge from the dark, cold, barren border-land, from the uncivilized mountains, standing sullen in the wild, shaggy chevelure of nature, and to walk again between towering hills dressed in the best toilet of human industry, crowned with golden wheatfields, and zoned with broad girdles of the greenest vegetation.  It is when these contrasts are suddenly and closely brought within the same vista that one sees and feels how the Creator has honored the labor of human hands, and lifted it up into partnership with His omnipotences in chronicling the consecutive centuries of the earth in illuminated capitals of this joint handwriting.  It is a grand and impressive sight - one of those dark-browed hills of the Border-land, bearded to its rock-ridged forehead with such bush-bristles and haired with matted heather.  In nature it is what a painted Indian squaw in her blanket, eagle feathers and moccasins, is in the world of humanity.  We look upon both with a species of admiration, as contrasts with objects whose worth is measured by the comparison.  The Empress Eugenie and the Princess of Wales, and wives and sisters lovelier still to the circles of humble life, look more beautiful and graceful when the eye turns to them from a glance at the best-looking squaw of the North American wilds.  And so looked the well-dressed hills on each side of the Teviot, compared with the uncultured and stunted mountains among which I had so recently walked.

Ascending from Teviotdale, I passed the Earl of Minto's seat, a large and modern-looking mansion, surrounded with beautiful grounds and noble trees, and commanding a grand and picturesque view of valley and mountain from an excellent point of observation.  As soon as I lost sight of Teviotdale another grand vista of golden and purpled hills and rich valleys burst upon my sight as suddenly as theatrical sceneries are shifted on the stage.  Dined in a little, rural, unpoetical village bearing the name of Lilliesleaf.  Resuming my walk, I soon came in sight of the grand valley of the Tweed, a great basin of natural beauty, holding, as it were, Scotland's "apples of gold in pictures of silver."  Every step commanded some new feature of interest.  Here on the left arose to the still, blue bosom of the sky the three great Eildon Hills, with their heads crowned with heather as with an emerald diadem.  The sun is low, and the far-off village in the valley shows dimly between the daylight and darkness.  There is the shadow of a broken edifice, broken but grand, that arises out of the midst of the low houses.  A little farther on, arches, and the stone vein-work of glassless windows, and ivy-netted towers come out more distinctly.  I recognise them at the next furlong.  They stand thus in pictures hung up in the parlors of thousands of common homes in America, Australia and India.  They are the ruins of Melrose Abbey.  Here is the original of the picture.  I see it at last, as thousands of Americans have seen it before.  In history and association it is to them the Westminster Abbey of Scotland, but in ruin.  It looks natural, though not at first glance what one expected.  The familiar engraving does not give us the real flesh and blood of the antiquity, or the complexion of the stone; but it does not exaggerate the exquisite symmetries and artistic genius of the structure.  These truly inspire one with wonder.  They are all that pen and pencil have described them.  The great window, which is the most salient feature in the common picture, is a magnificent piece of work in stone, twenty-four feet in height and sixteen in breadth.  It is all in the elm-tree order of architecture.  The old monks belonged to that school, and they wrought out branches, leaves and leaf-veins, and framed the lacework of their chisels with colored glass most exquisitely.

Melrose Abbey was the eldest daughter, I believe, of Rievaulx Abbey, in Yorkshire, which has already been noticed; a year or two older in its foundation than Fountain Abbey, in Studley Park.  The fecundity with which these ecclesiastical buildings multiplied and replenished England and Scotland is a marvel, considering the age in which they were erected and the small population and the poverty of the country.  But something on this aspect of the subject hereafter.  Here lie the ashes of Scottish kings, abbots and knights whose names figured conspicuously in the history of public and private wars which cover such a space of the country's life as an independent nation.  The Douglas family especially with several of its branches found a resting-place for their dust within these walls.  Built and rebuilt, burnt and reburnt, mutilated, dismembered, consecrated and desecrated, make up the history of this celebrated edifice, and that of its like, from Land's End to John O'Groat's.  It is a slight but a very appreciable mitigation of these destructive acts that it was ruined artistically; just as some enthusiastic castle and abbey-painter would have suggested.

Although I spent the night at Melrose, it was a dark and cloudy one, so that I could not see the abbey by moonlight - a view so much prized and celebrated.  The next day I literally walked from morning till evening among the tombstones of antiquity and monuments of Scotch history invested with an interest which will never wane.  In the first place, I went down the Tweed a few miles and crossed it in a ferry-boat to see Dryburgh Abbey.  Here, embowered among the trees in a silver curve of the river, stands this grand monument of one of the most remarkable ages of the world.  Within an hour's walk from Melrose, and four or five years only after the completion of that edifice, the foundations of this were laid.  It is astonishing.  We will not dwell upon it now, but make a separate chapter on it when I have seen most of the other ruins of the kind in the kingdom.  The French are given to the habit of festooning the monuments and graves of their relatives and friends with immortelles.  Nature has hung one of hers to Dryburgh Abbey.  It is a yew-tree opposite the door by which you enter the ruins.  The year-rings of its trunk register all the centuries that the stones of the oldest wall have stood imbedded one upon the other.  The tree is still green, putting forth its leaf in its season.  But there is an immortelle hung to these dark, crumbling walls that shall outlive the greenest trees now growing on earth.  Here, in a little vaulted chapel, or rather a deep niche in the wall, lie the remains of Sir Walter Scott, his wife and the brilliant Lockhart.  How many thousands of all lands where the English language is spoken will come and stand here in mute and pensive communion before the iron gate of this family tomb and look through the bars upon this group of simply-lettered stones!

From Dryburgh I walked back to Melrose on the east side of the Tweed.  Lost the footpath, and for two hours clambered up and down the precipitous cliffs that rise high and abrupt from the river.  In many places the zig-zag path was cut into the rock, hardly a foot in breadth, overhanging a precipice which a person of weak nerves could hardly face with composure.  At last got out of these dark fastnesses and ascended a range of lofty hills where I found a good carriage road.  This elevation commanded the most magnificent view that I ever saw in Scotland, excepting, perhaps, the one from Stirling Castle only for the feature which the Forth supplies.  It was truly beautiful beyond description, and it would be useless for me to attempt one.

After dinner in Melrose, I resumed my walk northward and came suddenly upon Abbotsford.  Indeed, I should have missed it, had I not noticed a wooden gate open on the roadside, with some directions upon it for those wishing to visit the house.  As it stands low down towards the river, and as all the space above it to the road is covered with trees and shrubbery, it is entirely hidden from view in that direction.  The descent to the house is rather steep and long.  And here it is! - Abbotsford!  It is the photograph of Sir Walter Scott.  It is brim full of him and his histories.  No author's pen ever gave such an individuality to a human home.  It is all the coinage of thoughts that have flooded the hemispheres.  Pages of living literature built up all these lofty walls, bent these arches, panelled these ceilings, and filled the whole edifice with these mementoes of the men and ages gone.  Every one of these hewn stones cost a paragraph; that carved and gilded crest, a column's length of thinking done on paper.  It must be true that pure, unaided literary labor never built before a mansion of this magnitude and filled it with such treasures of art and history.  This will forever make it and the pictures of it a monument of peculiar interest.  I have said that it is brim full of the author.  It is equally full of all he wrote about; full of the interesting topographs of Scotland's history, back to the twilight ages; full inside and out, and in the very garden and stable walls.  The studio of an artist was never fuller of models of human or animal heads, or of counterfeit duplicates of Nature's handiwork, than Sir Walter's mansion is of things his pen painted on in the long life of its inspirations.  The very porchway that leads into the house is hung with petrified stag-horns, doubtless dug up in Scottish bogs, and illustrating a page of the natural history of the country in some pre-historic century.  The halls are panelled with Scotland, - with carvings in oak from the old palace of Dunfermline.  Coats of arms of the celebrated Border chieftains are arrayed in line around the walls.  The armoury is a miniature arsenal of all arms ever wielded since the time of the Druids.  And a history attaches to nearly every one of the weapons.  History hangs its webwork everywhere.  It is built, high and low, into the face of the outside walls.  Quaint, old, carved stones from abbey and castle ruins, arms, devices and inscriptions are all here presented to the eye like the printed page of an open volume.  Among the interesting relics are a chair made from the rafters of the house in which Wallace was betrayed, Rob Roy's pistol, and the key of the old Tolbooth of Edinburgh.

I was conducted through the rooms opened to visitors by a very gentlemanly-looking man, who might be taken for an author himself, from his intellectual appearance and conversation.  The library is the largest of all the apartments - fifty feet by sixty.  Nor is it too large for the collection of books it contains, which numbers about 20,000 volumes, many of them very rare and valuable.  But the soul-centre of the building to me was the study, opening into the library.  There is the small writing-table, and there is the plain armchair in which he sat by it and worked out those creations of fancy which have excited such interest through the world.  That square foot over against this chair, where his paper lay, is the focus, the point of incidence and reflection, of thoughts that pencilled outward, like sun-rays, until their illumination reached the antipodes, - thoughts that brought a pleasant shining to the sun-burnt face of the Australian shepherd as he watched his flock at noon from under the shadow of a stunted tree; thoughts which made a cheery fellowship at night for the Hudson Bay hunter, in his snow-buried cabin on the Saskatchiwine.  The books of this little inner library were the body-guard of his genius, chosen to be nearest him in the outsallyings of his imagination.  Here is a little conversational closet, with a window in it to let in the leaf-sifted light and air - a small recess large enough for a couple of chairs or so, which he called a "Speak-a-bit."  Here is something so near his personality that it almost startles you like a sudden apparition of himself.  It is a glass case containing the clothes he last wore on earth, - the large-buttoned, blue coat, the plaid trousers, the broad-brimmed hat, and heavy, thick-soled shoes which he had on when he came in from his last walk to lay himself down and die.

On signing my name in the register, I was affected at a coincidence which conveyed a tribute of respect to the memory of the great author of striking significance, while it recorded the painful catastrophe which has broken over upon the American Republic.  It was a sad sight to me to see the profane and suicidal antagonisms which have rent it in twain brought to the shrine of this great memory and graven upon its sacred tablet as it were with the murdering dagger's point.  New and bad initials!  The father and patriot Washington would have wept tears of blood to have read them here, - to have read them anywhere, bearing such deplorable meaning.  They were U.S.A. and C.S.A., as it were chasing each other up and down the pages of the visitors' register.  Sad, sad was the sight - sadder, in a certain sense, than the smoke-wreaths of the Tuscarora and Alabama ploughing the broad ocean with their keels.  U.S.A. and C.S.A.!  What initials for Americans to write, with the precious memories of a common history and a common weal still held to their hearts - to write here or anywhere!  What a riving and a ruin do those letters record!  Still they brought in their severed hands a common homage-gift to the memory of the Writer of Abbotsford.  If they represented the dissolution of a great political fabric, in which they once gloried with equal pride, they meant union here - a oneness indissoluble in admiration for a great genius whose memory can no more be localised to a nation than the interest of his works.

American names, both of the North and South, may be found on almost every page of the register.  I wrote mine next to that of a gentleman from Worcester, Mass., my old place of residence, who only left an hour before my arrival.  Abbotsford and Stratford-upon-Avon are points to which our countrymen converge in their travels in this country; and you will find more of their signatures in the registry of these two haloed homesteads of genius than anywhere else in Europe.

The valley of the Tweed in this section is all an artist would delight in as a surrounding of such histories.  The hills are lofty, declining into gorges or dells at different angles with the river, which they wall in precipitously with their wooded sides in many places.  They are mostly cultivated to the top, and now in harvest many of them were crowned with stooked sheaves of wheat, each looking in the distance like Nature with her golden curls done up in paper, dressing for the harvest-home of the season.  Some of them wore belts and gores of turnip foliage of different nuances of green luxuriance, combining with every conceivable shade and alternation of vegetable coloring.  Indeed, as already intimated, the view from the eminence almost overhanging the little sequestered peninsula on which Old Melrose stood twelve centuries ago, is indescribably beautiful, and well worth a long journey to see, disconnected from its historical associations.  The Eildon Hills towering up heather-crowned to the height of over 1,300 feet above the level of the sea right out of the sheen of barley fields, as from a sea of silver, form one of the salient features of this glorious landscape.  This is an interesting peculiarity of Scotch scenery; - civilization sapping the barbarism of the wilderness; wheat-fields mordant biting in upon peaty moorlands, or climbing to the tops of cold, bald mountains, shearing off their thorny locks of heather and covering them with the well-dressed chevelure of yellow grain.  Where the farmer's horse cannot climb with the plough, or the little sheep cannot graze to advantage, human hands plant the Scotch larch or fir, just as a tenant-gardener would set out cabbage-plants in odd corners of his little holding which he could have no other use for.

Abbotsferry is just above Abbotsford, and is crossed in a small row-boat.  The river here is of considerable width and quite rapid.  The boat was kept on the other side; so I hallooed to a man engaged in thatching a rick of oats to come and ferry me over.  Without descending from the ladder, he called to some one in the cottage, when, to my surprise, a well-dressed young woman, in rather flowing dress, red jacket, and with her hair tastefully done up in a net a-la-mode, made her appearance.  Descending to the river, she folded up her gown, and, settling herself to the oars, "pushed her light shallop from the shore" with the grace of The Lady of the Lake.  In a few minutes she ran the prow upon the pebbled beach at my feet, and I took my seat at the other end of the boat.  She did it all so naturally, and without any other flush upon her pleasant face than that of the exercise of rowing, that I felt quite easy myself and checked the expression of regret I was on the point of uttering for putting her to such service.  A few questions convinced me it was her regular employment, especially when her father was busy.  I could not help asking her if she had ever read "The Lady of the Lake," but found that neither that romance nor any other had ever invested her river experience with any sensibility except of a cheerful duty.  She was going to do the whole for a penny, her usual charge, but I declined to take back any change for the piece of silver I gave to her, intimating that I regarded it cheap at that to be rowed over a river by such hands.

Almost opposite to Abbotsford I passed one of the best farming establishments I had seen in Scotland.  I was particularly struck with a feature which will hereafter distinguish the steddings or farm buildings in Great Britain.  Steam has already accomplished many changes, and among others one that could hardly have been anticipated when it was first applied to common uses.  It has virtually turned the threshing-floor out of doors.  Grain growing has become completely out-of-door work, from seeding to sending to market.  The day of building two-story barns for storing and threshing wheat, barley and oats is over, I am persuaded, in this country.  A quadrangle of slate-roofed cow-sheds, for housing horses and cattle, will displace the old-fashioned barns, each with its rood of roof.  This I saw on crossing the Tweed was quite new, and may serve as a model of the housing that will come into vogue rapidly.  One familiar with New England in the "old meeting-house" time would call this establishment a hollow square of horse-sheds, without a break or crevice at the angles.

I reached Galashiels about 5 p.m., and stopped an hour for tea.  This is a vigorous and thrifty town, that makes a profitable and useful business of the manufacture of tweeds, tartans and shawls.  It is situated on the banks of the Gala, a little, rapid, shallow river that joins the Tweed about a mile below.  After tea I resumed my walk, but owing to the confused direction of the landlady, took the wrong side of the river, and diverged westward toward Peebles.  I had made three miles or more in this direction before I found out my mistake, so was obliged to return to Galashiels, where I concluded to spend the night, after another involuntary excursion more unsatisfactory than my walk around Sheffield, inasmuch as I had to travel over the same road twice for the whole distance.  Thus the three mistakes thus far made have cost me twenty miles of extra footing.  The next morning I set out in good season, determined to reach Edinburgh, if possible, by night.

Followed the Gala Water, as it is called here, just as if it were a placid lake or land-locked bay, though it is a tortuous and swift-running stream.  The scenery was still picturesque, in some places very grand and romantic.  There was one great amphitheatre just before reaching the village of Stow which was peculiarly interesting.  It was a great bowl full of earth's glory up to the very rim.  The circular wall was embossed with the best patterns and colors of vegetation.  The hills of every tournure showed each in a fir setting, looking, with their sloping fields of grain, like inverted goblets of gold vined with emerald leafwork.  In the valley a reaping machine was at work with its peculiar chatter and clatter, and men and women were following in its wake, gathering up and binding the grain as it fell and clearing the way for the next round.  Up and down these hills frequently runs a stripe of Scotch firs or larches a few rods wide; here and there they resemble those geometrical figures often seen in gardens and pleasure grounds.  The sun peeping out of the clouds, and flooding these features with a sudden, transient river of light, gives them a glow and glory that would delight the artist.  After a long walk through such scenery, I reached, late in the evening, Auld Reekie, a favorite home-name which the modern Athenians love to give to Edinburgh.  Being anxious to push on and complete my journey as soon as practicable, I only remained in the celebrated Scotch metropolis one night, taking staff early next morning, and holding northward towards the Highlands.

Edinburgh has made its mark upon the world and its place among the great centres of the world's civilization.  On the whole, no city in Great Britain, or in Christendom, has ever attained to such well-developed, I will not say angular, but salient individuality.  This is deep-featured and ineffaceable.  It is, not was.  Edinburgh has reared great men prolifically and supplied the world with them, and kept always a good number back for itself to give a shaping to others the world needed.  Its prestige is great in the production of such intellects.  But it keeps up with the times.  It is faithful to its antecedents, and appreciates them at their full value and obligation.  It does not lie a-bed until noon because it has got its name up for educating brilliant minds.  Its grand old University holds its own among the wranglers of learning.  Its High School is proportionately as high as ever, notwithstanding the rapid growth of others of the same purpose.  Its pulpit boasts of its old mind-power and moral stature.  Its Theology stands iron-cabled, grand and solid as an iceberg in the sea of modern speculation, unsoftened under the patter of the heterodox sentimentalities of human philanthropy.  It is growing more and more a City of Palaces.  And the palaces are all built for housing the poorest of the poor, the weakest of the weak and the vilest of the vile.  These hospitals are the Holyroods of Edinburgh II.  They honor it with a renown better than the royal palace of the latter name ever won.

I said Edinburgh the Second.  That is correct.  There are two towns, the Old and the New; the last about half a century's age.  But the oldest will be the youngest fifty years hence.  The hand of a "higher civilization," with its spirit-level, pick, plane and trowel, is upon it with the grip of a Samson.  That hand will tone down its great distinctive individualities and give it the modern uniformity of design, face and feature.  All these tall houses, built skyward layer upon layer or flat upon flat, until they show half a dozen stories on one street, and twice that number on the other, are doomed, and they will be done for, one by one in its turn.  They probably came in with Queen Mary, and they will go out under the blue-eyed Alexandra.  They will be supplanted by the most improved architecture of modern taste and utilitarianism.  Edinburgh will be Anglicised and put in the fashionable costume of a progressive age; in the same swallow-tailed coat, figured vest and stovepipe hat worn by London, Liverpool and Manchester.  It will not be allowed to wear tweed pantaloons except for one circumstance; - that it is now building its best houses of stone instead of brick.

But there are physical features that will always distinguish Edinburgh from all other cities of the world and which no architectural changes can ever obliterate or deface.  There are Arthur's Seat, Salisbury Crags, the Calton Hill, and the Castle Height, and there they will stand forever - the grandest surroundings and garniture of Nature ever given to any capital or centre of the earth's populations.