Carlyle once, in a memorable outburst, declared that “the picturesque” to him was “a mere bore,” and that “simple knolls and fields, with brooks and hedges among them,” were best of all for his taste. If this was genuine, and not sheer Carlylean perversity, why then Ecclefechan, his native village, was the ideal birthplace, for it is the mere negation of beauty and the picturesque. Yet it has a certain interesting quality. It has “character.” For you could not pick out any individual house and point to its comeliness, but although Ecclefechan is in its component parts made up of precisely the same materials as fifty other Annandale villages, there is a distinctive personality in it which would be evident even if the stimulating association with Carlyle were not present. A rushing burn goes down one side of the street and the swifts fly and scream overhead. Among the unassertive white-faced and grey houses is one with an archway and above it a quaint window of quasi-Jacobean character. It is the dwelling-house built by Thomas Carlyle’s father and uncles about 1791, and over the doorway is the plain inscription, “Birthplace of Carlyle, 4 Dec. 1795.” Beside the doorway itself stands a boulder-stone, now graven with a characteristic Carlylean quotation: “That idle crag”; and always, above the shrilling of the swifts, you hear the murmur of the stream a few feet away: “the little Kuhbach gushing kindly by.” “The arch-house,” as it is known locally, was built with that central archway for the convenience of those three mason-brothers, James, Frank, and Tom, in storing the materials of their trade. There they reared their several families. “This umbrageous Man’s nest,” Carlyle styles it: and a very well-filled nest it was, too. To-day it is freely open to all comers, and many and diverse are those who come here. In the year ending August 31st, 1905, the house was visited by 1,700 people, who gazed with reverence, with curiosity, or with mere vacuity of mind—after their several sorts—upon the humble interiors. “And is this really the room in which Carlyle was born?” asked one in that first category, a good many years ago, in an awestruck voice. “Aye,” said the gudewife, who to be sure did not rightly comprehend the inner meaning of all this hero-worship; “an’ oor Maggie was born here, too.” Homeric laughter, doubtless, at this, in that place where the literary immortals foregather. [Sidenote: _IN THE BIRTHPLACE_]