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.