Perhaps in some ways it is as delightful now as ever; but motors and bicycles have changed its air, and its aspect. They seem as inconsistent with the air of "Tibbie's" as would be a railway train, or penny steamers on the loch. Necessarily, there is now about the place a more commercial air; it is no longer the mere cottage, with its simple fare of oatmeal porridge,--cooked as nowhere now it is cooked; milk, rich and frothy; of ham and eggs, the mere whiff of which would bring you in ravenous from loch or hill; of fresh caught trout fried in oatmeal and still sizzling as they were brought in. There are trout now as of {303}old, no doubt, and hens yet lay eggs, and pigs are turned to bacon; but you eat now with a sense of having a train to catch, or a motor hurriedly to jump into; your eye seems to be ever on the clock, and the old air of leisure and of peace is gone. Tibbie Shiel herself departed in time. She who, when all the world was young, listened many a time to that Shepherd who had "Found in youth a harp among the hills, Dropt by the Elfin people," I think could ill have brooked this twentieth century rush and hurry; she was spared the trial of finding the pure air of St. Mary's poisoned by the stench of petrol fumes. A native of Ettrick, born in 1782, Tibbie lived at her home in Yarrow till the summer of 1878, and she lies in the same kirk-yaird that "haps" all that is mortal of James Hogg. And here by the loch, almost at her door, with plaid around him, the Shepherd sits in effigy, as Christopher North predicted to him in 1824, with "honest face looking across St. Mary's Loch and up towards the Grey Mare's Tail, while by moonlight all your own fairies will weave a dance round its pedestal."