It is a royal progress, out of Edinburgh into the Middle Marches; past Dalkeith where James IV rode to meet and marry Margaret of England; past Borthwick, where Queen Mary spent that strange hot-trod honeymoon with Bothwell--of all place of emotion this is the most difficult to realize, and I can but think Mary's heart was broken here, and the heartbreak at Carberry Hill was but an echo of this; past Lauder, where the nobles of ignoble James III hung his un-noble favourite from the stone arch of the bridge; into the level rays of a setting sun--always the setting sun throws a more revealing light than that of noonday over this Scotland. _Melrose_ I remember on my first visit to Melrose, of course during my first visit to Scotland, I scheduled my going so as to arrive there in the evening of a night when the moon would be at the full. I had seen it shine gloriously on the front of York, splendidly on the towers of Durham. What would it not be on fair Melrose, viewed aright? I hurried northward, entered Edinburgh only to convey my baggage, and then closing my eyes resolutely to all the glory and the memory that lay about, I went southward through the early twilight. I could see, would see, nothing before Melrose. The gates of the Abbey were, of course, closed. But I did not wish to enter there until the magic hour should strike. The country round about was ineffably lovely in the rose light of the vanishing day. "Where fair Tweed flows round holy Melrose And Eildon slopes to the plain." The Abbey was, of course, the center of thought continually, and its red-gray walls caught the light of day and the coming shadows of night in a curious effect which no picture can report; time has dealt wondrously with this stone, leaving the rose for the day, the gray for the night. I wandered about, stopping in the empty sloping market-place to look at the Cross, which is as old as the Abbey; looking at the graveyard which surrounds the Abbey, where men lie, common men unsung in Scottish minstrelsy, except as part of the great hosts, men who heard the news when it was swift and fresh from Bannockburn, and Flodden, and Culloden; and where men and women still insert their mortality into this immortality--Elizabeth Clephane who wrote the "Ninety and Nine" lies there; and out into the country and down by the Tweed toward the Holy Pool, the Haly Wheel, to wonder if when I came again in the middle night, I, too, should see the white lady rise in mist from the waters, this lady of Bemersyde who had loved a monk of Melrose not wisely but very well, and who drowned herself in this water where the monk in penance took daily plunges, come summer, come winter. How often this is the Middle-Age penalty!