to where it enters the sea, under the time- and war-battered walls of the ancient town of Berwick, there were parts of the Tweed and its tributaries that he knew better than others. There is, in the eyes of Scott devotees, an Inner Circle, a “Holy of Holies”, of the Scott Country, and, fortunately for the pilgrim to these shrines, its centre lies where the main lines of road and rail, like those of river-drainage, converge around the meeting-place of Ettrick, Gala, and Leader with Tweed—under the shadow of the Eildon Hills and beside those two “miraculous” products of the hand and brain of man—Melrose Abbey and Abbotsford House. The creative art, in prose and verse, of the Great Magician was not often exercised on the chief stream higher up than Neidpath and Manor, or, at farthest, “Merlin’s Grave”, beside Drummelzier and under Tinnis. Nor did his genius much frequent the lower courses of Tweed, below Kelso Bridge and Wark Castle, and the inflow of the “sullen Till”, although here also are many scenes of beauty and pages of story that might well have set his imagination afire. It seems more at home, also, in the valleys of the Teviot, the Ettrick, and the Yarrow than on the Leader, the Gala, and other northern affluents of the Tweed. Accident and propinquity may have helped to determine his choice of scene and theme; but old associations and affinities may have done still more. The nearer the Border line of the Cheviots, the thicker are footprints of the clan and national frays of old—of battles and skirmishes in which Scott’s own ancestry took more than their share; and the deeper and richer the soil of tradition in which he delighted to delve. To the Teviot, the Borthwick, and the Ettrick—to Branxholm and Harden, Rankleburn and Newark—he was drawn by the call of the blood of his father’s race; an equal tie bound him to the Jed, the old home of his mother’s kin, the “hot and hardy Rutherfords”; while Yarrow, the heart of his Forest Sheriffdom, is also the core of its ballad poetry. It has to be remembered, also, that the period of Scott’s greatest literary output was also the period of failing physical powers, and that journeys through his beloved Borderland had to be more and more circumscribed to beaten paths of easy access.