Before us and far away was the round flat head of Minchmoor, with a dark, rich bloom on it from the thick, short heather--the hills around being green. Near the top, on the Tweed side, its waters trotting away cheerily to the glen at Bold, is the famous _Cheese Well_--always full, never overflowing. Here every traveler--Duchess, shepherd, or houseless _mugger_--stops, rests, and is thankful; doubtless so did Montrose, poor fellow, and his young nobles and their jaded steeds, on their scurry from Lesly and his Dragoons. It is called the Cheese Well from those who rest there dropping in bits of their provisions, as votive offerings to the fairies whose especial haunt this mountain was. After our rest and drink, we left the road and made for the top. When there we were well rewarded. The great round-backed, kindly, solemn hills of Tweed, Yarrow, and Ettrick lay all about like sleeping mastiffs--too plain to be grand, too ample and beautiful to be commonplace. There, to the north-east, is the place--_Williamhope_ ridge--where Sir Walter Scott bade farewell to his heroic friend Mungo Park. They had come up from _Ashestiel_, where Scott then lived, and where _Marmion_ was written and its delightful epistles inspired--where he passed the happiest part of his life--leaving it, as Hogg said, "for gude an' a'"; for his fatal "dreams about his cottage" were now begun. He was to have "a hundred acres, two spare bed-rooms, with dressing rooms, each of which will on a pinch have a couch-bed." We all know what the dream, and the cottage, and the hundred acres came to--the ugly Abbotsford; the over-burdened, shattered brain driven wild, and the end, death, and madness. Well, it was on the ridge that the two friends--each romantic, but in such different ways--parted never to meet again. There is the ditch Park's horse stumbled over and all but fell. "I am afraid, Mungo, that's a bad omen," said the Sheriff; to which he answered, with a bright smile on his handsome, fearless face--"_Freits_ (omens) follow those who look to them." With this expression, he struck the spurs into his horse, and Scott never saw him again. He had not long been married to a lovely and much-loved woman, and had been speaking to Scott about his new African scheme, and how he meant to tell his family he had some business in Edinburgh--send them his blessing, and be off--alas! never to return! Scott used to say, when speaking of this parting, "I stood and looked back, but he did not." A more memorable place for two such men to part in would not easily be found.