However Eildon got its present shape, it forms a singularly picturesque object in the landscape. And the scene that lies rolled out before anyone who chooses to climb either of the summits is one of the fairest that mortal eye ever rested upon. To the south the view is bounded only by "Cheviot's mountains lone;" to the north, by the Lammermoors; eastwards, the Tweed valley, lustrous in its vesture of green of many shades, spreads itself out for miles beyond Dryburgh and St. Boswell's, although the stream itself, from its way of hiding itself between deep and woody banks, is constantly vanishing from sight; westwards, beyond Abbotsford, to give variety to the view, the valley is less luxuriant, and the hills are larger, and instead of being divided into trim fields and meadows, or covered to their tops with bonny birks and hazels, present an unbroken surface of pasture-land, relieved only by patches of broom. To the south-west the outlying Ettricks keep ward over the valley where the shepherd-poet roamed and dreamed; full in view to the north-west, at the foot of the lovely Gala Water, is busy, brand-new Galashiels, blotting the blue with its smoke, and in other ways as well "sinning its gifts;" while nestling at the foot of the hill is Melrose, now a town rejoicing in "suburbs" and a hydropathic institution. The glory of Dryburgh Abbey is its situation and immediate surroundings, in which it is certainly superior to Melrose, and even to Kelso. To get to it you leave the public highway, cross the water, and presently pace along a shady avenue, to find it at last bosomed in trees, seated on a grassy flat that slopes gently down to the river, whose music may be heard as its waves ripple by, almost insulating the site--for nowhere, perhaps, does the Tweed curl into so many loops as between Mertoun and Abbotsford. And Nature, not content with furnishing an incomparable situation and almost incomparable surroundings, has done her best with ivy and other creeping plants to hide the scars left by the hands of violent men. What now meets the eye is the western gable of the nave, a gable of the south transept, with a five-light window, and a bit of the choir and north transept--sufficient to show that the abbey was much smaller than either of its neighbours. The transept and choir are First, the nave--rebuilt in the first half of the fourteenth century--Second, Pointed, while the conventual buildings, south of the abbey, show the transition from Romanesque to Pointed. At Melrose there is not a vestige of the monastic buildings left; here they are in better preservation than the Abbey itself. The most perfect of them is the chapter-house, over against which are some immemorial yews. The founder was Hugh de Morville, Lord of Lauderdale and Constable of Scotland; the stone--an obdurate brownish sandstone--was hewn from the quarry on the Dryburgh estate which yielded its substance also for Melrose. Ravished and burnt by Edward