Here, amongst the hills and the many waters, we must leave the Border. It is a country whose mountains are seldom grand or awe-inspiring, as in some parts of the Scottish Highlands they may be; its streams do not flow with the rich majesty of Thames, nor with the mighty volume of Tay; and there are, doubtless, rivers possessed of wilder scenery. But to the true Borderer, however long absent he be, into what part {426}soever of the world he may have been driven by the Fates, there are no hills like the Border hills--they are indeed to him "the Delectable Mountains"; there are no waters so loved, none that sing to him so sweetly as Tweed and all the streams of his own land. "If I did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die," said Scott. To a greater or less extent it is so with all of us. One of her most loving sons (he who should have guided the course of this volume, and who, had he lived, would have made of it something worthy of the Border), once said, on his return from a visit to famed Killarney: "The beauty of the Irish Lakes is rather that of the Professional Beauty. When one comes back to the Border, there one finds the same beauty one used to see in the face of one's mother, or of one's old nurse." And: "I am never so happy as when I cross the Tweed at Berwick from the South," he writes in an Introduction to Mr. Charles Murray's "Plamewith." It was not only his own, but, I think, every Borderer's sentiments that he voiced when he wrote: "Brief are man's days at best; perchance I waste my own, who have not seen The castled palaces of France Shine on the Loire in summer green. "And clear and fleet Eurotas still, You tell me, laves his reedy shore, And flows beneath his fabled hill Where Dian drave the chase of yore. "And 'like a horse unbroken' yet The yellow" stream with rush and foam, 'Neath tower, and bridge, and parapet, Girdles his ancient mistress, Rome! "I may not see them, but I doubt If seen I'd find them half so fair As ripples of the rising trout That feed beneath the elms of Yair. "Unseen, Eurotas, southward steal, Unknown, Alpheus, westward glide, You never heard the ringing reel, The music of the water side! "Though Gods have walked your woods among, Though nymphs have fled your banks along; You speak not that familiar tongue Tweed murmurs like my cradle song. "My cradle song,--nor other hymn I'd choose, nor gentler requiem dear Than Tweed's, that through death's twilight dim,