As you ascend a lane from the ferry to go to the abbey, you find a few cottages, and a great gate, built in the style of an old castle gateway, with round stone pillars with lantern summits, and the cross displayed on each--a sort of poor parody on the gateway at Abbotsford. This castle gateway is the entrance, however, to no castle, but to a large orchard, and over the gate is inscribed--"Hoc Pomarium sua manus satum Parentibus suis optimis sac: D. S. Buchaniæ Comes." That is, "This orchard, _sown_ by his own hands, the Earl of Buchan dedicates to his best of parents." The whole is worthy of the man. If there be any sense in it, the orchard was _sown_ by this silly old lord, not the _trees_; and these were merely _sown_ by him, and not _planted_. And why dedicate an orchard to his deceased parents? Were they so excessively fond of apples? Why not satisfy himself with some rational monument? But then he must have been rational himself; and it must be recollected that this was the man who, when Scott was once very ill, forced himself into the house in order to get at the invalid, and arrange with him, in his last moments, the honors of a great heraldic funeral procession; the same man that Scott afterward congratulated himself was dead first, lest he should have made some foolish extravagance of the sort over his remains. But, to return to the orchard gateway--it is droll enough, immediately under the pious and tender inscription to his parents, in Latin, to see standing this sentence, in plain English--"MAN-TRAPS AND SPRING-GUNS PLACED IN THIS ORCHARD." Quere? Are they, too, dedicated to his best of parents, or only to his poor brethren of mankind?