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