'I could not help giving utterance to my thoughts. Scott hummed for a moment to himself, and looked grave; he had no idea of having his muse complimented at the expense of his native hills. "It may be partiality," said he, at length; "but to my eye, these grey hills and all this wild Border Country have beauties peculiar to themselves. I like the very nakedness of the land; it has something bold, and stern, and solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest grey hills; and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, _I think I should die_!" The last words were said with an honest warmth, accompanied with a thump on the ground with his staff, by way of emphasis, that showed his heart was in his speech.' Following Irving's visit came Lady Byron--for a day only--spent on the banks of the Yarrow. Lord Byron never was at Abbotsford. Scott and he met at John Murray's London house and elsewhere, and they frequently corresponded. Like the old heroes in Homer, they exchanged gifts. Scott gave Byron a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the redoubted Elfi Bey, and some time after, Byron sent to Abbotsford a large sepulchral vase of silver, filled with dead men's bones from the Piræus, and suitably inscribed. A letter from the noble poet accompanying the gift was filched from the vase, much to Scott's annoyance. That same year, 1817, Sir David Wilkie painted his incongruous 'Abbotsford Family' (in the Scottish National Gallery), wherein Scott figures as a miller and the rest of the group as peasants. Sir Adam Ferguson, who commissioned the picture, was depicted as a poacher. Wilkie's impressions of Abbotsford, in a letter to his sister, reveal the pleasant nature of his visit. 'I have never been in any place,' he says, 'where there is so much real good humour and merriment. There is nothing but amusement from morning till night, and if Scott is really writing "Rob Roy," it must be while we are sleeping.' (That was practically so.) 'He is either out planting trees, superintending the masons, or erecting fences, the whole of the day. He goes frequently out hunting, and this morning there was a whole cavalcade of us out hunting hard.'