IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF SCOTT.

Otago Witness, Issue 2630, 10 August 1904, Page 69

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF SCOTT.

By Edith Seakle Geossmanx, M.A.

V.— A WINTER DAY AT ABBOTSFORD.^

My way to Abbotsford lay through an old Scotch village, stone-walled, and grey with moss, where there was an aged Border castel, a square, solid towei overgrown with ivy, with stone steps leading to the doorway, guarded by grim stone lions. The castle, crumbling with the weight of years, stood a visible record of the wild, stirring days of the Hohneres and ' Douglasses and Percys and the rude Bo.rder chivalry. It - was » ontrast to the soft, fair placidity of the road along the Tweed, where at one bend -I looked down from the high bank on the broad stream of silver, the fail green meadows, "the haughs" shimmering through the mist, and giving space to groups of larches, still lovely, though their slender, hanging threads were all leafless. The thaw had come the day before from the softening of the atmosphere, and not from any sun, for there was none in that grey ■season. Dark mist clouds hung over the wooded hills, and a south-east wind was blowing through the harpstrings of the bare trees. There was scarcely any life to be seen yet among the twigs of the hawthorn hedges bounding the sloping fallow fields. At Abbotsford the house was obdurately shut against us because i f . was not the time of year for tourists. But I was easily consoled. After all, it is not a maa of relics that most touches the heart and mind. It almost seemed a sacrilege lo make a museum of his sword and volunteer equipments, his writing table and desk and chair, and the clothes he last wore. It was almost enough for me .to see his fantastic garden' and wander down through the wood where he must so often have trod to the stony strand of the river. Dead leaves lay thick under branches, and heaped on roots of trees, andi green strawberry leaves grew amongst the wet grass. On one side was. the garden wall of Abbotsford, the cluster of grey stone turrets showing above. There was not a tourist far or near. The winter atmosphere was very still. My . only companion -was a whitehaired country schoolmaster, and his companionship was in full harmony with the scene. In front of us flowed Scott's wellloved Tweed, "murmuring over its pebbled bed," as he heard it for the last time on the 'morning that he passed away. VI.— THE CLOSING SCENE : DRY-

BURGH ABBEY,

Dryburgh appeals to the imagination even more than Melrose, not that its associations are so rich and varied, but because they are more intimately personal. Aisle and transept and choir, wall and tower, cloister and cell, all have vanished except for some fine suggestive fragments mixed with earth and tufted grass, or shrouded in ivy. In the best-preserved walls the wallflowers flourish abundantly, and make airy . gardens in mouldering crevices and cranny. All is returning quietly to Nature. Nature is transforming all that she receives. Melrose stands amongst the houses of the town, but Dryburgh is alone, seculded from men in its beautiful wood and fields. Beyond the ruins are dark cedars and an ancient yew that has outlived the changes of 800 years. The abbey must have covered an extensive space of ground. Part of the monastery can still be seen, including the half-subterranean chap-ter-house, and the two dungeons, in one of which the nun of Dryburgh lived) without beholding the sun, her fate suggesting to Scott that of " Smaylhome's lady gay." A little pathway ajtfiost hidden under the bare, delicate branches of the larches and the evergreen holly and the spruce, and bounded by mossy walls of stone, leads into the remnants of the chapel. Here a lofty piece of wall, grassgrown and topped with ivy, is crumbling in decay, and there stands the solitary carved arch of a door. Between the Norman doorway at one entrance and th 9 choir, where once the altar stood, the turf •has taken the place of the vanished pavement, and a gravelled pathway leads up the ruined aisle. A tall, dark yew tree has sprung up in the grass, and hides half of the ruined wall on the south. Fragments are strewn about on every side ; in one place a heap of broken stone sculptures from window and niche and pillar and door, heaped together and rotting back to the semblance of Nature's' handiwork ; in another place a broken column wreathed as thickly as a forest stump with ivy. In what war once the central aisle are tombs and fragments of tombs, some -worn shapeless, while others still bear traces of rich carving. The fiat stones, green with moss, look as if rooted in the earth. Here is an old stone coffin, the stone head-rest telling its antiquity, and a little distance off a shapeless fragment of -wall and a grey cross. Brairbles and ivy and wallflower have taken the plac-e of the old seats of prayer

' and penitence. On the day that I sas' Dryburgh winter had assumed) yet anotner pha=e from my experiences of it in this district. The atmo&phere was strangely ana sweetly soft and mild for Scotland. Beao's of mist were hanging on the brambles and 1 ivy, and on the few red berries still lingef- , ing on the biiar. It was the very atmosi phere of rest. In between the gaps of the chapel the soft green sward laj T covered ! with dead oak leaves. The shrine of my ' pilgrimage was in St. Mary's aisle, the one part still remaining to show what has been. ' Here, near the tablets to theSEalliburtons, | Scott's ancestors, within iron railings, are the tombs of polished red granite that hold all that -^-as mO rtal of himself and those he loved best. Some grey doves kept flitI ting from the broken masonry of the south transept to the neighbourhood of the grave with flutterings and cooings, or sitting perched aloft as if carved in stone. These tombstones look as strangely new and fresh as if placed only yesterday in this old crumbling ruin. And yet perhaps it is as well : they are ? token of his fame that is as fresh to-day as the day aftei he died. ! His wife lies by his side, and below the level stone is his idolised sen, the second baronet. A brief inscription tells us that "Here at the feet of Sir Walter Scott lie .the mortal remains of John Gibson Lockhart, his biographer friend." His own ! tomb bears only the name andi 'dates. Nothing Tiore is needed. There is no pomp or ambitious monument fit for the gentle lover of Nature — nothing more appropriate than these lonely ruin& and still woods. j This monument is the truei unbn of the | Scotch and English, and he lies not here, ■ but in the hearts of "thousands, "triumphing \ over Death and thee, O Time." I [The End.]