They were weird things, those box beds, that have been mentioned as still existing in Tibbie Shiel's cottage, weird, and responsible for much ill-health, more especially one would suppose, for consumption. They were built into the wall of a room, and they had wooden doors that could be drawn close at night, entirely cutting them off from the room, and jealously excluding every breath of fresh air. Some had a very small sliding trap, or eyelet hole, in one of the doors, opening at the side just above the pillow, but the custom was, as I understand, to shut even that. The box-bed was of old almost universal in peasants' cottages in the Border. No doubt it gave a certain amount of privacy to the occupant or occupants, but what countless forms of disease it must have fostered! The present writer can remember the case of a young man of twenty-five or so, who, to the puzzled wonder of his friends, {304}died of a galloping consumption. "I canna think hoo he could hae gotten't," said his sister to the daughter of her mistress. "He was aye _that_ carefu' o' himsel'. Od! he wad hap himself up that warm, an' he aye drew the doors o' his bed close, an' shuttit the verra keek-hole. Na! I canna think hoo he could hae catched it." [Illustration: 0324] To add to the sanitary joys of those homes of disease germs, it was, too, the almost universal custom to use the space below the bed as a kind of store house. The writer can remember as a boy to have seen in one of the most decent and respectable of such cottages, bags of potatoes stowed under the sleeping place occupied by a husband and wife! {305}Quitting now the Loch, and following the road that leads down Yarrow to Selkirk, on our left, half a mile or so from the road and overhanging the burn, stands the massive little tower of Dryhope. This was the birthplace, about the year 1550, of the beautiful Mary Scott, the Flower of Yarrow, bride of Scott of Harden. I suppose that Harden must have succeeded his father-in-law in the possession of Dryhope, for in 1592, James VI issued orders to demolish the tower of Dryhope, "pertaining to Walter Scott of Harden who was art and part of the late treasonable act perpetuate against His Highness' own person at Falkland." James' instructions, however, cannot have been carried out very effectually, if at all, for Dryhope, though roofless, is in rather better preservation than are the majority of Border peels.