The interests of Abbotsford are many and great. It is indeed "a romance in stone and lime," every outline, as Lockhart says, with little exaggeration, "copied from some old baronial edifice in Scotland, every roof and window blazoned with clan bearings, or the lion rampant gules, or the heads of the ancient Stuart kings." And Sir Walter was from his earliest years a diligent gleaner of curiosities; so that, apart from many precious mementoes of himself, the rooms which the Hon. Mrs. Constable Maxwell Scott, his great-grand-daughter, throws open to the public, form a museum of the rarest interest. But, after all, it is chiefly the desire to make acquaintance with the scenes amid which the sanest and shrewdest of our great writers since Shakespeare spent the most eventful years of his blameless life that draws to Abbotsford its crowds of pilgrims. It was here that he wrote most of his works; here that he met the great disaster of his life in a spirit which showed in combination the loftiest chivalry and the nicest commercial integrity; here that he piously submitted himself to the stroke of death. The story of his return to Abbotsford to die is full of pathos. "As we rounded the hill at Ladhope, and the outline of the Eildons burst on him," says his biographer, "he became greatly excited; and when ... his eye caught at length his own towers ... he sprang up with a cry of delight." Then they bore him into the dining-room, and his dogs "began to fawn upon him and lick his hands, and he alternately sobbed and smiled over them until sleep oppressed him." The next day he felt better, he said, and might disappoint the doctors after all. But his strength continued to leave him, and he was often delirious and unconscious. One day, about two months after his return, he sent for his son-in-law, who found him with eye "clear and calm," though in the last extreme of feebleness. "Lockhart," he said, "I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man--be virtuous, be religious--be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here." These were almost his last words. Four days afterwards he breathed his last, in the presence of all his children. "It was a beautiful day--so warm that every window was open, and so perfectly still that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes." Surely this man died "in the odour of sanctity" as truly as Waltheof of Melrose or any tonsured saint of them all. [Illustration: GALASHIELS.]