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.