Annandale was the home of Bruce, and the great Robert is supposed to have been born at Lochmaben, which, situated on seven lochs, is a sort of Caledonian Venice. Bruce, not unmindful of the place of his nativity, is famed to have created it a royal burgh soon after his sword won him the crown. This did not prevent the citizens from treating through many generations his ancestral castle as a common quarry, and nothing is now left but a shapeless mass of stones. According to old Bellenden, in his translation of Boace (1536), the people of former times were a terrible lot; the women worst of all! "The wyvis usit to slay thair husbandis, quhen they wer found cowartis, or discomfit be thair ennymes, to give occasion to otheris to be more bald and hardy quhen danger occurrit." "To learn them for their tricks," as Burns might have remarked. Annandale's most famous modern son was Thomas Carlyle, who, as everybody knows, was born at Ecclefechan in 1795, and was buried there at the end of his long career on a "cloudy, sleety day" early in 1881. Ecclefechan is on the Main Water, a tributary of the Annan; you will find it described in "Sartor Resartus" as Entepfuhl. Many spots around are connected with his life or works. Hoddam Kirk, his parish church, he pointed out to Emerson in a remarkable talk as an illustration of the connection of historical events. His once bosom friend, Edward Irving, was born in the town of Annan, of which Carlyle had his own memories, for here he went to school, first to learn, afterwards to teach. Craigenputtock, where he lived for six years, is in Nithsdale, the third division of Dumfries, to which we now turn. * * * * * The /Nith/, its name-river, in its course of some seventy miles, rising in Ayrshire, passes through the Queen of the South, as its citizens proudly designate Dumfries, and, during the last ten miles of its existence, is rather an estuary than a river. It has many important tributaries--the Carron, with its almost Alpine gorge, known as the Wallpath; the Enterkin, with its famed Enterkin pass, of old time the bridle-path from Clydesdale to Nithsdale, noted for the famous rescue in 1684 of a band of Covenanting prisoners who were being conveyed to Edinburgh; the Minnick Water, with its many traditions of the Hill Folk; and "many mo'."