To a shepherd in Canada Dr. Norman Macleod is said to have remarked, "What a glorious country this is!" "Ay," said the man, "it is a very good country." "And such majestic rivers!" "Oh, ay," was all the reply. "And such good forests!" "Ay, but there are nae linties in the woods, and nae braes like Yarrow!" Of course, the answer was from a purely exile point of view, but even to those of the Old Country the name of Yarrow wields the most wondrous fascination. Like Tweed, Yarrow is known everywhere, for who has not heard of its "Dowie Dens," or of its lovers' tragedies? Certainly no stream has been more besung. The name is redolent of all that is most pathetic in Border poetry. This is the centre of the Border ballad country--the birthplace, or, at all events, the nursing-ground of a romance than which there is none richer or more extensive on either side of the Border. The Yarrow is the Scottish Rhine-land on a small scale, even more so than the Tweed. Tweedside, indeed, has not a tithe of Yarrow's ballad wealth, and the Tweed ballads and folk-lore are absolutely different in respect both of subject-matter and of manner. The curious feature about Yarrow is the wonderful sameness which characterises the whole of its minstrelsy. For hundreds of years that has been so. Sadness is the uppermost note that is sounded. All through we are face to face with a feeling of dejection as remarkable as it is common. One could have understood a stray effusion or so couched in this strain, but for an entire minstrelsy to breathe such a spirit is extraordinary. Why should Yarrow be the personification, as it were, of a grief and a melancholy that nothing seems able to assuage? Is there anything in the scenery to account for it--anything in the physical conditions of the glen itself that solves the secret? There is, and there isn't. To a mere outsider--a mere summer tripper hurrying through--Yarrow is little different from others of the southland valleys. Its main features are identical with those of the Ettrick, and the Tweed uplands, or with the Ewes and the Teviot. All of them exhibit the same pastoral stillness. The same play of light and shade are on their hills. The same soothing spirit broods over them. But of Yarrow alone it is the element of sadness that prevails. To understand this, one has to _live_ in Yarrow--to come under the influence of its environment. And whether it be fancy or not, whether it be the result of one's reading, and of one's pre-conceived notions of the place, the Yarrow landscape does lend itself to the realisation of that feeling which the ballads so well portray. The configuration of the glen as seen especially from a little above Yarrow Manse--the "Dowie Dens" of popular tradition--together with its climatic conditions, may very easily interpret for us the spirit of those old singers. Here, if anywhere in the valley, the answer to the Yarrow enigma will be found.