BORDER TOWNS
_Kelso_
It is a very great little country which lies all about Melrose, with
never a bend of the river or a turn of the highway or a shoulder of the
hill, nay, scarce the shadow of any hazel bush or the piping of any wee
bird but has its history, but serves to recall what once was; and
because the countryside is so teeming seems to make yesterday one with
to-day. The distances are very short, even between the places the
well-read traveler knows; with many places that are new along the way,
each haunted with its tradition, soon to haunt the traveler, while the
people he meets would seem to have been here since the days of the
Winged Hats.
Perhaps in order to get into the center of the ecclesiastical
country--for after this being a Borderland, and a Scott-land, it is
decidedly Abbots-land, even before Abbotsford came into being with its
new choice of old title--the traveler will take train to Kelso, or walk
there, a scant dozen miles from Melrose.
The journey is down the Tweed, which opens ever wider between the gentle
hills that are more and more rounding as the flow goes on to the sea.
There is not such intense loneliness; here is the humanest part of the
Scottish landscape, and while even on this highway the cottages are not
frequent, and one eyes the journeymen with as close inspection as one is
eyed, still it is a friendly land. The southern burr--we deliberately
made excuse of drinking water or asking direction in order to hear
it--is softer than in the North; yet, you would not mistake it for
Northumberland. We wondered if this was the accent Scott spoke with; but
to him must have belonged all the dialect-voices.
It was at Roxburgh Castle that King David lived when he determined to
build these abbeys of the Middle Marches, of which the chief four are
Melrose, Dryburgh, Jedburgh and Kelso, with Holyrood as their royal
keystone.
Roxburgh was a stronghold of the Border, and therefore met the fate of
those strongholds, when one party was stronger than the other; usually
the destruction was by the English because they were farther away and
could hold the country only through making it desolate.
Who would not desire loveliness and desire to fix it in stone, if he
lived in such a lovely spot as this where the Tweed and Teviot meet?
David had been in England. He was brother to the English queen Maude,
wife of Henry I, and had come in contact with the Norman culture. Or, as
William of Malmesbury put it, with that serene assurance of the
Englishman over the Scot, he "had been freed from the rust of Scottish
barbarity, and polished from a boy from his intercourse and familiarity
with us." Ah, welladay! if residence at the English court and Norman
culture resulted in these lovely abbeys, let us be lenient with William
of Malmesbury. Incidentally David added to the Scotland of that time
certain English counties, Northumberland and Cumberland and
Westmoreland--as well as English culture!
David was son to Saxon Margaret, St. Margaret, and from her perhaps the
"sair sanct" inherited some of his gentleness. But also he had married
Matilda of Northumberland, wealthy and a widow, and he preferred to
remain on the highway to London rather than at Dunfermline. So he was
much at Roxburgh.
But the castle did not remain in Scottish or English hands. It was while
curiously interested in a great Flemish gun that James II was killed by
the explosion--and the siege of Roxburgh went on more hotly, and the
castle was razed to its present low estate.
To-day the silly sheep are cropping grass about the scant stones that
once sheltered kings and defied them; and ash trees are the sole
occupants of the once royal dwelling. To the American there is something
of passing interest in the present seat of the Duke of Roxburgh, Floors
castle across the Teviot. For the house, like many another Scottish
house, still carries direct descent. And an heiress from America, like
the heiress from Northumberland, unites her fortune with this modern
splendour--and admits Americans and others on Wednesdays!
The town of Kelso is charming, like many Tweed towns. It lies among the
wooded hills; there is a greater note of luxury here. Scott called it
"the most beautiful if not the most romantic village in Scotland." Seen
from the bridge which arches the flood, that placid flood of Tweed, and
a five-arched bridge ambitiously and successfully like the Waterloo
bridge of London, one wonders if after all perhaps Wordsworth wrote his
Bridge sonnet here--"Earth hath not anything to show more fair." Surely
this bridge, these spires and the great tower of the Abbey, "wear the
beauty of the morning," the morning of the world. The hills, luxuriously
wooded, rise gently behind, the persistent Eildons hang over, green
meadows are about, the silver river runs--and the skies are Scottish
skies, whether blue or gray.
The Abbey, of course, is the crown of the place, bolder in design and
standing more boldly in spite of the havoc wrought by men and time, and
Hertford and Henry VIII; calmer than Melrose, less ornamental, with its
north portal very exquisite in proportion.
The Abbot of Kelso was in the palmy early days chief ecclesiastic of
Scotland, a spiritual lord, receiving his miter from the Pope, and
armoured with the right to excommunicate.
There have been other kings here than David and the Abbot. The latter
days of the Stewarts are especially connected with Kelso, so near the
Border. Baby James was hurried hither and crowned in the cathedral as
the III after Roxburgh. Mary Queen lodged here for two nights before she
rode on to Berwick. Here in the ancient market-place, looking like the
square of a continental town, the Old Chevalier was proclaimed King
James VIII on an October Monday in 1715, and the day preceding the
English chaplain had preached to the troops from the text--"The right
of the first born is his." Quite differently minded from that Whig
minister farther north, who later prayed "as for this young man who has
come among us seeking an earthly crown, may it please Thee to bestow
upon him a heavenly one."
When this Rising of the Forty Five came, and he who should have been
Charles III (according to those of us who are Scottish, and royalist,
and have been exiled because of our allegiance) attempted to secure the
throne for his father, he established his headquarters at Sunilaw just
outside Kelso; the house is in ruins, but a white rose that he planted
still bears flowers. To the citizens of Kelso who drank to him, the
Prince, keeping his head, and having something of his royal great
uncle's gift of direct speech, replied, "I believe you, gentlemen, I
believe you. I have drinking friends, but few fighting ones in Kelso."
Scott knew Kelso from having lived here, from going to school here, and
it was in out of the Kelso library--where they will show you the very
copy--that he first read Percy's Reliques.
"I remember well the spot ... it was beneath a huge platanus, in the
ruins of what had been intended for an old fashioned arbour in the
garden.... The summer day had sped onward so fast that notwithstanding
the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the dinner hour. The first time
I could scrape together a few shillings I bought unto myself a copy of
the beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book half so
frequently or with half the enthusiasm."
Was it not a nearer contemporary to Percy, and a knight of romance, Sir
Philip Sidney, who said, "I never read the old song of Percie and
Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet"?
For myself I have resolutely refused to identify the word, Platanus,
lest it should not be identical with the spot where I first read my
Percy.
Scott also knew Kelso as the place of his first law practice, and of his
honeymoon. Here flowered into maturity that long lavish life, so
enriched and so enriching of the Border.
Horatio Bonar was minister here for thirty years--I wondered if he wrote
here, "I was a wandering sheep."
While James Thomson, who wrote "The Seasons," but also "Rule,
Britannia"--if he was a Scotsman; perhaps this was an Act of Union--
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves!"
was born at a little village nearby, back in the low hills of Tweed, in
1700, seven years before the Union.
_Jedburgh_
From Kelso I took train to the Border town which even the Baedeker
admits has had "a stormy past," and where the past still lingers; nay,
not lingers, but is; there is no present in Jedburgh. It is but ten
miles to the Border; more I think that at any other point in all the
blue line of the Cheviot, is one conscious of the Border; consciousness
of antiquity and of geography hangs over Jedburgh.
It lies, a hill town, on the banks of the Jed; "sylvan Jed" said
Thomson, "crystal Jed" said Burns; a smaller stream than the Tweed, more
tortuous, swifter, rushing through wilder scenery, tumultuous, vocative,
before Border times began--if ever there were such a time before--and
disputatious still to remind us that this is still a division in the
kingdom.
One of the most charming walks in all Scotland--and I do not know of any
country where foot-traveler's interest is so continuous (I wrote this
before I had read the disastrous walking trip of the Pennell's)--is up
this valley of the Jed a half dozen miles, where remnants of old forest,
or its descendants, still stand, where the bracken is thick enough to
conceal an army crouching in ambush, where the hills move swiftly up
from the river, and break sharply into precipices, with crumbling peel
towers, watch towers, to guard the heights, and where outcropping red
scars against the hill mark sometimes the entrance to caves that must
have often been a refuge when Border warfare tramped down the valley.
In Jedburgh we lodged not at the inn; although the name of Spread Eagle
much attracted us; but because every one who had come before us had
sought lodging, we, too, would "lodge," if it be but for a night.
Mary Queen had stayed at an old house, still standing in Queenstreet,
Prince Charles at a house in Castlegate, Burns in the Canongate, the
Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, in Abbey Close, because there was no
room in the inn. I do not know if it were the Spread Eagle then, but the
assizes were being held, Jethart justice was being administered, or,
juster justice, since these were more parlous times, and parley went
before sentence. Scott as a sheriff and the other officials of the
country were filling the hostelry. But Sir Walter, then the Sheriff of
Selkirk, sheriff being a position of more "legality" than with us, and
no doubt remembering his first law case which he had pled at Jedburgh
years before, came over to Abbey Close after dinner, and according to
Dorothy Wordsworth "sate with us an hour or two, and repeated a part of
the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel.'"
Think of not knowing whether it was an hour or two hours, with Scott
repeating the "Lay," and in Jedburgh.
We lodged in a little narrow lane, near the Queen in the Backgate, with
a small quaint garden plot behind; there would be pears in season, and
many of them, ripening against these stone walls. The pears of the
Border are famous. Our landlady was removed from Yetholm only a
generation. Yetholm is the gipsy capital of this countryside. And we
wondered whether Meg Faa, for so she ambitiously called herself, by the
royal name of Scottish Romany, was descended from Meg Merrilies. Mrs.
Faa had dark flashing eyes in a thin dark face, and they flashed like a
two-edged dagger. She was a small woman, scarce taller than a Jethart
ax as we had seen them in the museum at Kelso. I should never have dared
to ask her about anything, not even the time of day, and, in truth, like
many of the Scotch women, she had a gift of impressive silence. All the
night I had a self-conscious feeling that something was going to happen
in this town of Jed, and in the morning when I met Mrs. Faa again and
her eyes rather than her voice challenged me as to how I had slept, I
should not have dared admit that I slept with one eye open lest I become
one more of the permanent ghosts of Jed.
[Illustration: JEDBURGH ABBEY.]
The Abbey is, in its way, its individual way, most interesting of the
chief four of "St. David's piles." It is beautifully lodged, beside the
Jed, near the stream, and the stream more a part of its landscape;
smooth-shaven English lawns lie all about, a veritable ecclesiastical
close. It is simpler than Melrose, if the detail is not so marvelous,
and there is substantially more of it. The Norman tower stands square;
if witches still dance on it they choose their place for security. The
long walls of the nave suggest almost a restoration--almost.
When the Abbey flourished, and when Alexander III was king, he was
wedded here (1285) to Joleta, daughter of the French Count de Dreux.
Always French and Scotch have felt a kinship, and often expressed it in
royal marriage. The gray abbey walls, then a century and a half old,
must have looked curiously down on this gay wedding throng which so
possessed the place, so dispossessed the monks, Austin friars come from
the abbey of St. Quentin at Beauvais.
Suddenly, in the midst of the dance, the King reached out his hand to
the maiden queen--and Death, the specter, met him with skeleton fingers.
It may have been a pageant trick, it may have been a too thoughtful
monk; but the thirteenth century was rich with superstition. Six months
later Alexander fell from his horse on a stormy night on the Fife
coast--and the prophetic omen was remembered, or constructed.
The Abbey was newly in ruin when Mary Queen rode down this way, only
twenty-one years after Hertford's hurtful raid. Court was to be held
here, the assizes of October, 1566, at this Border town. For the Border
had been over-lively and was disputing the authority of the Scottish
queen as though it had no loyalty. Bothwell had been sent down as Warden
of the Marches to quell the marauding free-booters. He had met with
Little Jock Elliott, a Jethart callant, a Border bandit, to whom we can
forgive much, because of the old ballad.
"My castle is aye my ain,
An' herried it never shall be;
For I maun fa' ere it's taen,
An' wha daur meddle wi' me?
Wi' my kuit in the rib o' my naig,
My sword hangin' doun by my knee,
For man I am never afraid,
An' wha daur meddle wi' me?
Wha daur meddle wi' me,
Wha daur meddle wi' me?
Oh, my name is little Jock Elliott,
An' wha daur meddle wi' me?
"I munt my gude naig wi' a will
When the fray's in the wind, an' he
Cocks his lugs as he tugs for the hill
That enters the south countrie,
Where pricking and spurring are rife,
And the bluid boils up like the sea,
But the Southrons gang doon i' the strife,
An' wha daur meddle wi' me?"
And perhaps we can forgive the reiver, since he dealt a blow to Bothwell
that those of us who love Mary have longed to strike through the long
centuries. Bothwell took Elliott in custody, Elliott not suspecting that
a Scot could prove treacherous like a Southron, and was carrying him to
the Hermitage. Jock asked pleasantly what would be his fate at the
assize.
"Gif ane assyises wald mak him clene, he was hertlie contentit, but he
behuvit to pas to the Quenis grace."
This was little promise to little Jock Elliott. He fled. Bothwell
chased. Bothwell fired, wounded Jock, overtook him, and Jock managed to
give Bothwell three vicious thrusts of his skene dhu--"Wha daur meddle
wi' me!"--before Bothwell's whinger drove death into little Jock
Elliott.
Bothwell, wounded, perhaps to death, so word went up to Edinburgh, was
carried to the Hermitage.
Buchanan, the scandalous chronicler of the time--there were such in
Scotland, then, and always for Mary--set down that "when news thereof
was brought to Borthwick to the Queen, she flingeth away in haste like a
madwoman by great journeys in post, in the sharp time of winter, first
to Melrose, and then to Jedworth."
It happened to be the crisp, lovely, truly Scottish time, October, and
Mary opened court at Jedburgh October 9, presiding at the meetings of
the Privy Council, and then rode to the Hermitage October 16. She rode
with an escort which included the Earl of Moray, the Earl of Huntley,
Mr. Secretary Lethington, and more men of less note. For six days the
girl queen (Mary was only twenty-four in this year of the birth of
James, year before the death of Darnley, the marriage with Bothwell, the
imprisonment at Loch Leven) had been mewed to state affairs, and a ride
through the brown October woods, thirty miles there and thirty miles
back again, must have lured the queen who was always keen for adventure,
whether Bothwell was the goal, or just adventure.
[Illustration: HERMITAGE CASTLE.]
The mist of the morning turned to thick rain by night, and the return
ride was made in increasing wet and darkness. Once, riding ahead and
alone and rapidly, the Queen strayed from the trail, was bogged in a
mire, known to-day as the Queen's Mire, and rescued with difficulty.
Next day Mary lay sick at Jedburgh, a sickness of thirty days, nigh unto
death. News was sent to Edinburgh, and bells were rung, and prayers
offered in St. Giles. On the ninth day she lay unconscious, in this
little town of Jedburgh, apparently dead, twenty years before
Fotheringay. "Would God I had died at Jedburgh."
She did not die. Darnley visited her one day, coming from Glasgow.
Bothwell came as soon as he could be moved, and the two made
convalescence together in this old house of Jedburgh, perhaps the
happiest house of all those where the legend of Mary persists. Even
to-day it has its charm. The windowed turret looks out on the large
fruit garden that stretches down to the Jed, very like that very little
turret of "Queen Mary's Lookout" at Roscoff where the child queen had
landed in France less than twenty years before.
Five years later, when Mary was in an English prison, a proclamation was
read in her name at the town cross of Jedburgh, the herald was roughly
handled by the Provost who received his orders from England, and
Buccleuch and Ker of Fernihurst revenged themselves by hanging ten loyal
(?) citizens who stood with the Provost.
Later, a century later, when at the town cross the magistrates were
drinking a health to the new sovereign, a well-known Jacobite came by.
They insisted on his joining in the toast. And he pledged--"confusion to
King William, and the restitution of our sovereign and the heir!" Bravo,
the Borderers!
_Selkirk_
The sentimental journeymen--with whom I count myself openly--may
hesitate to visit Yarrow. It lies so near the Melrose country, and is so
much a part of that, in song and story, that it would seem like leaving
out the fragrance of the region to omit Yarrow. And yet--. One has read
"Yarrow Unvisited," one of the loveliest of Wordsworth's poems. And one
has read "Yarrow Visited." And the conclusion is too easy that if the
unvisitings and visitings differ as much as the poems it surely were
better not to "turn aside to Yarrow," to accept it as
"Enough if in our hearts we know
There's such a place as Yarrow....
For when we're there although 'tis fair,
'Twill be another Yarrow."
There is peril at times in making a dream come true, in translating the
dream into reality, in lifting the mists from the horizon of
imagination. Should one hear an English skylark, an Italian nightingale?
should one see Carcassonne, should one visit Yarrow?
Ah, welladay. I have heard, I have seen. Just at first, because no
dream can ever quite come true, not the dream of man in stone, or of
song in bird-throat, or even of nature in trees and sky and hills, there
is a disappointment. But after the reality these all slip away into the
misty half-remembered things, even Carcassonne, even Yarrow; the dream
enriched by the vision, the vision softened again into dream.
And so, I will down into Yarrow.
Coaches run, or did before the war, and will after the war, through the
pleasant dales of Yarrow and Moffat, dales which knew battles long ago
and old unhappy far off things, but very silent now, too silent; almost
one longs for a burst of Border warfare that the quiet may be filled
with fitting clamour. The coaches meet at Tibbie Shiel's on St. Mary's
and it is to Tibbie's that you are bound, as were so many gallant
gentlemen, especially literary gentlemen, before you.
Selkirk is the starting point. And Selkirk is a very seemly, very
prosperous town, looking not at all like an ecclesiastic city, as it
started to be in the dear dead days of David the saint, looking very
much as a hill city in Italy will look some day when Italy becomes
entirely "redeemed" and modern, and exists for itself instead of for
the tourist. Selkirk is indifferent to tourists, as indeed is every
Scottish town; Scotland and Scotsmen are capable of existing for
themselves. Selkirk hangs against the hillside above the Ettrick, and
its show places are few; the spot where Montrose lodged the night before
the defeat at Philipshaugh, the statue of Scott when he was sheriff,
"shirra," the statue of Mungo Park near where he was given his medical
training, and the home of Andrew Lang.
There is no trace of the "kirk o' the shielings," founded by the
religious from Iona, from which by way of Scheleschyrche came Selkirk.
Nor is there trace of Davis's pile, ruined or unruined, in this near,
modern, whirring city. It is the sound of the looms one remembers in
Selkirk, making that infinity of yards of Scotch tweed to clothe the
world. Selkirk and Galashiels and Hawick form the Glasgow of the Border.
Always industrious, in the time of Flodden it was the "souters of
Selkirk" who marched away to the Killing--
"Up wi' the Souters of Selkirk
And down wi' the Earl o' Home."
These same souters--shoemakers--were busy in the time of Prince Charles
Edward and contracted to furnish two thousand pair of shoes to his
army; but one does not inquire too closely into whether they furnished
any quota of the four thousand feet to go therein.
It was a warm sunny day when I made my pilgrimage up the Yarrow to St.
Mary's. Although Yarrow has always sung in my ears, I think it was
rather to see one sight that I came for the first time to Scotland, to
see
"The swan on still St. Mary's Lake
Float double, swan and shadow."
I rather think it was for this I had journeyed across the Atlantic and
up the East coast route. Such a sentimental lure would I follow. But
then, if that seems wasteful and ridiculous excess of sentiment, let us
be canny enough, Scotch enough, to admit that one sees so many other
things, incidentally.
The "wan waters" of the Yarrow were shimmering, glimmering, in the
morning light as I coached out of Selkirk, and by Carterhaugh.
"I forbid ye, maidens a',
That wear gowd in your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh;
For young Tamlane is there."
These round-shouldered hills, once covered with the Wood of Caledon, and
the Forest of Ettrick, and the Forest of Yarrow, are very clear and
clean in their green lawns to-day, scarce an ancient tree or a late
descendant standing; here and there only gnarled and deformed, out of
the centuries, out of perhaps that "derke forest" of James IV. His son,
the Fifth James, thought to subdue the Border and increase his revenue
by placing thousands of sheep in this forest; and these ruining the
trees have decreased the tourists' rightful revenue. It is because of
this absence of trees that one is perhaps more conscious of the shining
ribbon of river; longer, clearer stretches may be seen in the green
plain:
"And is this--Yarrow? This the stream
Of which my fancy cherished
So faithfully a waking dream?
An image that has perished!
O that some minstrel's harp were near
To utter notes of gladness,
And chase this silence from the air
That fills my heart with sadness!"
About Philipshaugh, two miles from Selkirk, the trees are in something
of large estate, with oak and birch and fir and rowan, making dark
shadows in the fair morning, as the historically minded traveler would
fain have it. For it was there that Montrose met defeat, his small band
against Leslie's many men. All about there lie legends of his fight and
his flight across the Minchmoor and on to the North.
And through here Scott loved to wander. Here he let the Minstrel begin
his Last Lay--
"He paused where Newark's stately Tower
Looks down from Yarrow's birchen bower."
And it was hither the Scotch poet came with Wordsworth, as the English
poet describes it--
"Once more by Newark's Castle gate
Long left without a warder,
I stood, looked, listened, and with Thee
Great Minstrel of the Border."
Nearby, and near the highways, is the deserted farm cottage, the
birthplace of Mungo Park, who traveled about the world even as you and
I, and I fancy his thought must often have returned to the Yarrow.
The driver will point out the Trench of Wallace, a redout a thousand
feet long, on the height to the North; and here will come into the
Border memories of another defender of Scotland who seems rather to
belong to the North and West.
Soon we reach the Kirk of Yarrow, a very austere "reformed" looking
basilica, dating back to 1640, which was a reformed date, set among
pleasant gardens and thick verdure. Scott and Wordsworth and Hogg
have worshiped here, and from its ceiling the heraldic devices of many
Borderers speak a varied history.
[Illustration: NEWARK CASTLE.]
Crossing the bridge we are swiftly, unbelievingly, on the Dowie Dens of
Yarrow.
"Yestreen I dream'd a dolefu' dream;
I fear there will be sorrow!
I dream'd I pu'd the heather green,
Wi' my true love on Yarrow.
"But in the glen strive armed men;
They've wrought me dole and sorrow;
They've slain--the comeliest knight they've slain--
He bleeding lies on Yarrow.
"She kiss'd his cheek, she kaim'd his hair,
She search'd his wounds all thorough;
She kiss'd them till her lips grew red,
On the dowie houms of Yarrow."
Then we come into the country of Joseph Hogg. The farm where he was
tenant and failed, for Hogg was a shepherd and a poet, which means a
wanderer and a dreamer. And soon to the Gordon Arms, a plain rambling
cement structure, where Hogg and Scott met by appointment and took their
last walk together.
Hogg is the spirit of all the Ettrick place. Can you not hear his
skylark--"Bird of the wilderness, blithesome and cumberless"--in that
far blue sky above Altrive, where he died--"Oh, to abide in the desert
with thee!"
And now the driver tells us we are at the Douglass Glen, up there to the
right lies the shattered keep of the good Lord James Douglass, the
friend of Bruce. Here fell the "Douglass Tragedy," and the bridle path
from Yarrow to Tweed is still to be traced.
"O they rade on and on they rade,
And a' by the light of the moon,
Until they came to yon wan water,
And there they lighted down."
_St. Mary's_
And soon we are at St. Mary's Loch--which we have come to see. To one
who comes from a land of lakes, from the Land of the Sky Blue Water,
there must be at first a sudden rush of disappointment. This is merely a
lake, merely a stretch of water. The hills about are all barren, rising
clear and round against the sky. They fold and infold as though they
would shield the lake bereft of trees, as though they would shut out the
world. Here and there, but very infrequent, is a cluster of trees; for
the most part it is water and sky and green heathery hills. The water
is long and narrow, a small lake as our American lakes go, three miles
by one mile; but large as it looms in romance, rich as it bulks in
poetry.
[Illustration: INTERIOR VIEW, TIBBIE SHIEL'S INN.]
Tibbie Shiel's is, of course, our goal. One says Tibbie Shiel's, as one
says Ritz-Carlton, or the William the Conqueror at Dives. For this is
the most celebrated inn in all Scotland, and it must be placed with the
celebrated inns of the world. There is no countryside better sung than
this which lies about St. Mary's, and no inn, certainly not anywhere a
country inn, where more famous men have foregathered to be themselves.
Perhaps the place has changed since the most famous, the little famed
days, when Scott stopped here after a day's hunting, deer or Border song
and story, up Meggatdale; and those famous nights of Christopher North
and the Ettrick shepherd, nights deserving to be as famous as the
Arabian or Parisian or London. The world has found it out, and times
have changed, as a local poet complains--
"Sin a' the world maun gang
And picnic at St. Mary's."
The inn, a rambling white house, stands on a strip between two waters,
added to no doubt since Tibbie first opened its doors, but the closed
beds are still there--it was curious enough to see them the very summer
that the Graham Moffatts played "Bunty" and "The Closed Bed"--and the
brasses which Tibbie polished with such housewifely care.
For Tibbie was a maid in the household of the Ettrick shepherd's mother.
She married, she had children, she came here to live. Then her husband
died, and quite accidentally Tibbie became hostess to travelers, nearly
a hundred years ago. For fifty-four years Tibbie herself ran this inn;
she died in what is so short a time gone, as Scottish history goes, in
1878.
During that time hosts of travelers, particularly, wandered through the
Border, came to this "wren's nest" as North called it. Hogg, of course,
was most familiar, and here he wished to have a "bit monument to his
memory in some quiet spot forninst Tibbie's dwelling." He sits there, in
free stone, somewhat heavily, a shepherd's staff in his right hand, and
in his left a scroll carrying the last line from the "Queen's
Wake"--"Hath tayen the wandering winds to sing."
Edward Irving, walking from Kirkcaldy to Annan, was here the first year
after Tibbie opened her doors so shyly. Carlyle, walking from
Ecclefechan to Edinburgh, in his student days, caught his first glimpse
of Yarrow from here--and slept, may it be, in one of these closed beds?
Gladstone was here in the early '40's during a Midlothian campaign. Dr.
John Brown--"Rab"--came later, and even R. L. S. knew the hospitality of
Tibbie Shiel's when Tibbie was still hostess.
It is a long list and a brave one. In this very dining-room they ate
simply and abundantly, after the day's work; in this "parlour" they
continued their talk. And surely St. Mary's Lake was the same.
Down on the shore there stands a group of trees, not fir trees, though
these are most native here. And here we loafed the afternoon away--for
fortunately we were the only ones who "picnic at St. Mary's." There were
the gentleman and his wife whom we took for journalistic folk, they were
so worldly and so intelligent and discussed the world and the
possibilities of world-war--that was several years ago--until at the
Kirk of Yarrow the local minister, Dr. Borlund, uncovered this minister,
James Thomson, from Paisley. If all the clergy of Scotland should become
as these, austerity of reform would go and the glow of culture would
come.
We all knew our history and our poetry of this region, but none so well
as the minister. It was he who recited from Marmion that description
which is still so accurate--
"By lone St. Mary's silent Lake;
Thou know'st it well--nor fen nor sedge
Pollute the clear lake's crystal edge;
Abrupt and sheer the mountains sink
At once upon the level brink;
And just a trace of silver strand
Marks where the water meets the land.
Far in the mirror, bright and blue,
Each hill's huge outline you may view;
Shaggy with heath, but lonely, bare,
Nor tree nor bush nor brake is there,
Save where of land, yon silver line
Bears thwart the lake the scatter'd pine.
Yet even this nakedness has power,
And aids the feelings of the hour;
Nor thicket, dell nor copse you spy,
Where living thing conceal'd might lie;
Not point, retiring, hides a dell
Where swain, or woodman lone might dwell;
There's nothing left to fancy's guess,
You see that all is loneliness;
And silence aids--though the steep hills
Send to the lake a thousand rills;
In summer time, so soft they weep.
The sound but lulls the ear asleep;
Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude,
So stilly is the solitude."
[Illustration: ST. MARY'S LAKE.]
Across the water is the old graveyard of vanished St. Mary's kirk. And
it was the low-voiced minister's wife--a Babbie a little removed--who
knew
"What boon to lie, as now I lie,
And see in silver at my feet
St. Mary's Lake, as if the sky
Had fallen 'tween those hills so sweet,
And this old churchyard on the hill,
That keeps the green graves of the dead,
So calm and sweet, so lone and wild still,
And but the blue sky overhead."
We sat in the silences, the still silent afternoon, conscious of the
folk verse that goes--
"St. Mary's Loch lies shimmering still,
But St. Mary's kirkbell's lang dune ringing."
Suddenly, over the far rim of the water, my eye caught something white,
and then another, and another. And I knew well that were I but nearer,
as imagination knew was unnecessary, I might see the swan on still St.
Mary's Lake, and their shadow breaking in the water.