To the halting pen, it is the indescribable. In the deathless lines of the Wizard himself, its beauty lives to all time. But a thousand years of purgatory might not suffice to wipe from their Record of Sin the guilt {227}incurred by Hertford, and Evers, and Laiton, in 1544 and 1545 when they wantonly profaned and laid waste this dream in stone and lime, wrought by "some fairy's hand." Nor in later days were our own people free from offence in this respect. The number of old houses in the immediate neighbourhood is probably very small into which have not been built stones from the ruined abbey. Even across the river they are found; in the walls of a mouldering old farm house there, pulled down but a few years ago, were discovered many delicate bits of scroll work and of finely chiselled stone. A mile to the west of Melrose lies the village of Darnick. Here is a fine old tower dating from the sixteenth century, the property still of the family that originally built it. Fain would Sir Walter Scott have bought this picturesque old building after he moved to Abbotsford, and many another has looked on it with longing eyes, but no offer has succeeded in divorcing it from the stock of the original owner, though the surrounding lands have melted away. Somewhere about 1425 a Heiton built the earliest tower. That, naturally, could not stand against the all-destroying hand of Hertford in 1544, but the Heiton's descendant repaired, or rebuilt, it in 1569, and ever since it has remained in the possession of the family, still, I believe, is occasionally inhabited by them. It is now probably the finest existing specimen of the old bastel-house. From its watch-tower may be had a glimpse of Tweed at Bridgend, where Father Philip, Sacristan of St. Mary's, took his involuntary bath. This is the Bridgend mentioned in Sir Walter's Notes to _The Monastery_. The ancient and very peculiar bridge over Tweed which gave to the hamlet its name is described in the text of the novel. There is now no trace of such a bridge, but in the early part of the eighteenth century the pillars yet stood. They are described in Gordon's _Itnerarium Septentrionale_ (1726), and in Milne's account of the Parish of Melrose published in 1794, there is a full description. Those pillars yet stood, he says. "It has been a timber bridge; in the {228}middle pillar there has been a chain for a drawbridge, with a little house for the convenience of those that kept the bridge and received the custom. [Illustration: 0248] On this same pillar are the arms of {229}the Pringles of Galashiels." In Sir Walter's day, only the foundations of the piers existed. He tells how, "when drifting down the Tweed at night, for the purpose of killing salmon by torch light," he used to see them.