"I can stand on the Eildon Hill and point out forty-three places famous in war and verse," Sir Walter said to our Irving. "I have brought you, like a pilgrim in the Pilgrim's Progress, to the top of the Delectable Mountains, that I may show you all the goodly regions hereabouts. Yonder is Lammermuir and Smailholm; and there you have Galashiels and Torwoodelee and Gala Water; and in that direction you see Teviotdale and the Braes of Yarrow; and Ettrick stream winding along like a silver thread to throw itself into the Tweed. It may be pertinacity, but to my eye, these gray hills and all this wild Border country have beauties peculiar to themselves. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like an ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my own honest gray hills; and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die." On the morrow. But for to-night it was enough to remember that perfect picture as imagination painted it in Andrew Lang's verse-- "Three crests against the saffron sky, Beyond the purple plain, The kind remembered melody Of Tweed once more again. "Wan water from the Border hills, Dear voice from the old years, Thy distant music lulls and stills, And moves to quiet tears. "Like a loved ghost thy fabled flood Fleets through the dusky land; Where Scott, come home to die, has stood, My feet returning, stand. "A mist of memory broods and floats, The Border waters flow; The air is full of ballad notes Borne out of long ago. "Old songs that sung themselves to me, Sweet through a boy's day dream, While trout below the blossom'd tree Plashed in the golden stream. "Twilight, and Tweed, and Eildon Hill, Fair and too fair you be; You tell me that the voice is still That should have welcomed me." I did not miss the voice, any of the voices. They whispered, they sang, they crooned, they keened, about me. For this was Melrose, _mael ros_, so the old Celtic goes, "the naked headland in the wood." And I was seeing, was hearing, what I have come to see and hear; I, a Scot, if far removed, if in diluted element, and Scott's from the reading days of Auld Lang Syne. And should I not within the moonlight see the white lady rise from the Haly Wheel? And should I not see the moonlight flooding the Abbey, Melrose Abbey? Out of a remembered yesterday, out of a confident midnight--surely there was a budding morrow in this midnight--I remembered the lines--