It is a valley of whose delights one must needs chatter, although with but dim hopes of communicating much of its charm. Through it that little stream called by the medicinally sounding name, the Eye Water, wanders with a feminine hesitancy and inconstancy of purpose. It flows all ways by turns and never long in any direction, and with so many amazing loops and doublings, that it might well defy the precision of the Ordnance chartographers themselves. We bid farewell to this fickle stream at Grant’s House, and scrape acquaintance with another, the Pease Burn, flowing in another direction. For Grant’s House stands on the watershed which orders the going of several watercourses. It is also the summit level of this railway route to the North. Here, quite close to the road, is Grant’s House station, and here, bordering the road itself, are the houses that form Grant’s House itself. This sounds like speaking in paradox, but the place is a village, or rather a scattered collection of pretty cottages that have gathered around the one inn which was the home of the original Grant. The place-name seems to hint of other and less-travelled times, when these Borders were sparsely settled and wayfarers few; when but one house served to take the edge off the solitude, and that an inn kept by one Grant. The imagination, thus uninstructed, weaves cocoons of speculation around these premises and conceives him to have been a host of abounding personality, thus to hand his name down to posterity, preserved in a place-name, like a fly in amber. But all speculations that start upon this innkeeping basis would be incorrect, for this sponsorial Grant was the contractor who made the road from Berwick to Edinburgh, building a cottage for himself in this then lonely spot, which only in later years became the Grant’s House inn. More streams and woods beyond this point, and then comes the long and toilsome rise up to Cockburnspath, past Pease Burn, where the road takes a double S curve on the hillside, and other tall hills, to right and left and ahead, largely covered with firs and larches, seem to look on with a gloomy anticipation of some one, less cautious than his fellows, breaking his neck. Where there are no hillside woods there are grass meadows in which, if it be June or July, the haymakers can be seen from the road, haymaking, with attendant horses and carts, at a perilous angle. The Pease Burn, flowing deep down in its Dene, is spanned at a height of 127 feet, half a mile down stream, by a four-arched bridge, built in 1786. XXXI