The best way to ascend it is from Traquair. You go up the wild old Selkirk road, which passes almost right over the summit, and by which Montrose and his cavaliers fled from Philiphaugh, where Sir Walter's mother remembered crossing, when a girl, in a coach-and-six, on her way to a ball at Peebles, several footmen marching on either side of the carriage to prop it up or drag it out of the moss _haggs_; and where, to our amazement, we learned that the Duchess of Buccleuch had lately driven her ponies. Before this we had passed the grey, old-world entrance to Traquair House, and looked down its grassy and untrod avenue to the pallid, forlorn mansion, stricken all o'er with eld, and noticed the wrought-iron gate embedded in a foot deep and more of soil, never having opened since the '45. There are the huge Bradwardine bears on each side--most grotesque supporters--with a superfluity of ferocity and canine teeth. The whole place, like the family whose it has been, seems dying out--everything subdued to settled desolation. The old race, the old religion, the gaunt old house, with its small, deep, comfortless windows, the decaying trees, the stillness about the doors, the grass overrunning everything, nature reinstating herself in her quiet way--all this makes the place look as strange and pitiful among its fellows in the vale as would the Earl who built it three hundred years ago if we met him tottering along our way in the faded dress of his youth; but it looks the Earl's house still, and has a dignity of its own. We soon found the Minchmoor road, and took at once to the hill, the ascent being, as often is with other ascents in this world, steepest at first. Nothing could be more beautiful than the view as we ascended, and got a look of the "eye-sweet" Tweed hills, and their "silver stream." It was one of the five or six good days of this summer--in early morning, "soft" and doubtful; but the mists drawing up, and now the noble, tawny hills were dappled with gleams and shadows-- "Sunbeams upon distant hills gliding apace"-- the best sort of day for mountain scenery--that ripple of light and shadow brings out the forms and the depths of the hills far better than a cloudless sky; and the horizon is generally wider.