Above Kelso--to return, with apologies, to the Tweed--the valley opens out, and the trees grow thicker, while the larch and the fir begin to come more into evidence. At Mertoun House, Lord Polwarth's seat, environed with groves, one of those Introductions to the cantos of "Marmion" which so hamper the movement of the poem, while they contain some of the poet's finest lines, is dated. Sir Walter was passing Christmas here, and even then, when the boughs were all leafless, "Mertoun's halls" were fair. In another of the Introductions much that is interesting in a biographical sense is said about the large gabled tower which, as it stands four-square to all the winds that blow, is one of the most prominent objects in the landscape for miles along the valley. It is the Smailholm Tower of the mystical "Eve of St. John," and is built among a cluster of crags a few miles north of the stream, in the parish which contains Sandyknowe, a farmhouse leased by Sir Walter's paternal grandfather from Scott of Harden. Thus it happened that from his third to his eighth year young Walter was often sojourning in the parish of Smailholm; and long afterwards, as the shattered tower and crags amid which the "lonely infant" had strayed and mused until the fire burned, rose up before him in vision, he confessed the poetic impulse which came to him in this "barren scene and wild." The tower, anciently the property of the Pringles of Whytbank, now of Lord Polwarth, is a typical Border peel--not a castle, but simply a large square keep of enormous strength, the walls being nine feet thick; the chambers built over one another in three storeys, with communication by a narrow circular stair; the roof a platform; the whole enclosed by an outer wall. Much nearer the river, on the other side, is another Border strength, Littledean Tower, the keep of the Kers of Nenthorn; and close at hand stands the old shaft of the village cross, where in more stirring days than these, at the "jowing" of the bell, the men of the barony, armed with sword and lance, and sometimes with a "Jethart stave" (the Scots never took kindly to the twanging of the yew), would assemble in their hundreds to guard their own byres, or, mounted on their vigorous little ponies, to prick across the Border to empty their neighbours', and belike to ruin them "stoop and roop." [Illustration: MELROSE ABBEY, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST.] [Illustration: MELROSE ABBEY: THE EAST WINDOW.]