It was at Kelso, one remembers, that Sir Walter Scott first met James Ballantyne, with whose fortunes his own were afterwards to become so inextricably blended. Scott was then but a growing boy f his health had been giving trouble, and he was sent by his father to stay for six months with an aunt "who resided in a small house, situated very pleasantly in a large garden to the eastward of the churchyard of Kelso, which extended down to the Tweed." During the time of Scott's stay, Ballantyne and he were class-mates under Mr. Lancelot Whale, master of the Kelso Grammar School. The acquaint ance then formed was never quite broken off, and all the world knows the story of its outcome. We now follow Prince Charles into "Pleasant Teviotdale, a land Made blithe with plough and harrow," a rich, well-wooded grassy land, cultivated of old under the Benedictines of Kelso. Little more than a mile from that town, by the road leading to St. Boswells up Tweed's southern bank, on a wooded ridge overhanging Teviot and separated from Tweed by but a narrow flat haugh, stands all that is left of Roxburgh Castle,--a few isolated portions of massive wall defended on the north and, {079}east sides by a ditch. [Illustration: 0099] At the west end a very deep cutting divides this ridge from the high ground farther to the west. Ditch and cutting apparently were in former times flooded with water run in from Teviot, for even as late as the end of the eighteenth century remains of a weir or dam could still be {080}seen stretching across the river. No trace of it now remains. Those who razed the castle took care that the dam should be broken beyond repair, and countless winter floods have long since swept away the little that may have been left. Close to the castle probably stood the once important town of Roxburgh, with its streets and churches, its convent and schools, and its Mint, where many of our Scottish coins were struck. Where are those streets and churches now? Not a trace of them is to be found. The houses were of wood, no doubt, and easily demolished, but the churches, the convent, and the Mint, one would expect to have been of build substantial enough to leave some indication of where they had stood. Roxburgh, more than any other Border town, experienced the horrors of war. Her castle was one of four great Scottish strongholds--Edinburgh, Stirling, Berwick, Roxburgh--and it mattered little whether it were temporarily held by England or by Scotland, on the inhabit ants of the town fell the brunt of those horrors. Castle and town were continually being besieged, continually changing hands, sometimes by stratagem--as when on Shrove Tuesday, 1314, the Good Sir James Douglas, with sixty men, surprised the garrison and took the castle from the English;--sometimes by siege and assault, as when James II was killed by the bursting of "the Lion," one of his own clumsy pieces of ordnance, a gun similar to that ancient weapon,