The North British junction for Selkirk is at Galashiels, another thriving woollen town, whose mills may not have improved the physique of the “braw lads of Gala Water.” Before reaching this, the main line, holding up the Tweed where it is looked down upon by a colossal statue of Wallace, passes two more of David I.’s quartet of Abbeys, so that the tourist has no excuse for not visiting Dryburgh and Melrose. Melrose, indeed, is a tourist shrine, that owns a somewhat sheltered climate, with natural charms enough to fill its adjacent Hydropathic and the hotels about the Abbey and the Cross, nucleus of a group of Tweedside hamlets, to which warm red stone, sometimes filched from the ruins, gives a snug and cheerful aspect; then the nakedness of the slopes, held by Scott a beauty, though he laboured to clothe it with plantations, hides nooks like that Rhymer’s Glen, where True Thomas was spirited away by the Fairy Queen, and that Fairy Dean in which the White Lady of Avenel appeared to Halbert Glendinning. Above rise the triple Eildon Hills, in whose caverns Arthur and his knights lie sleeping, and from the top, as our Last Minstrel boasted, can be seen more than forty spots famed in history or song. Of Melrose Abbey, the finest remains of Scottish ecclesiastical architecture in its golden age, and of its [Illustration: MELROSE, ROXBURGHSHIRE] illustrious tombs, let the guide-books speak, and the romance that deals with this neighbourhood of “Kennaquhair,” an _alias_ plagiarised by Carlyle in his _Weissnichtwo_. Visiting it “by pale moonlight” or otherwise, few will not turn three miles up the river to that other showplace, Abbotsford, the Delilah of his imagination that bound Scott in withs of care and set him to toiling for Philistines. The baronial mansion, now overlooked by outlying villas of Galashiels, was all his own creation, and most of the trees were planted by himself, in the absorbing process that began with buying a hundred ill-famed acres, and ended with such unfortunate success in making, as he said, “a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” When one thinks what it cost him, this exhibition of artificial feudalism has its painful side; yet another Sir Walter, a romancer of our own generation, declares that it “would make an oyster enthusiastic.” But more moving is the pilgrimage from Melrose down the Tweed to where, in St. Mary’s Aisle of Dryburgh Abbey, the most beautiful fragment of a noble fane, among the tombs of his kin lies at rest Scotland’s most illustrious son, he who best displayed the warp and woof that makes the chequered pattern of his country’s nature.