It is not possible to approach Abbotsford, as it should be approached, from the riverside, the view with which one is familiar, the view the pictures carry. Or, it can be done if one would forego the walk, take it in the opposite direction, and come hither by rail from Galashiels--that noisy modern factory town, once the housing place for Melrose pilgrims, which to-day speaks nothing of the romance of Gala water, and surely not these factory folk "can match the lads o' Gala Water." It is a short journey, and railway journeys are to be avoided in this land of by-paths. But there, across the water, looking as the pictures have it, and as Scott would have it, rises Abbotsford, turreted and towered, engardened and exclusive. It stands on low level ground, for it is redeemed out of a duckpond, out of Clarty hole. Sir Walter wished to possess the Border, or as much of it as might be, so he made this first purchase of a hundred acres in 1811. As he wrote to James Ballantyne-- "I have resolved to purchase a piece of ground sufficient for a cottage and a few fields. There are two pieces, either of which would suit me, but both would make a very desirable property indeed, and could be had for between 7,000 and 8,000 pounds, or either separate for about half that sum. I have serious thoughts of one or both." He began with one, and fourteen years later, when the estate had extended to a thousand acres, to the inclusion of many fields, sheep-cropped and story-haunted, he entered in his diary-- "Abbotsford is all I can make it, so I am resolved on no more building, and no purchases of land till times are more safe." By that time the people of the countryside called him "the Duke," he had at least been knighted, and was, in truth, the Chief of the Border; a royal ambition which I doubt not he cherished from those first days when he read Percy under a platanus. He paid fabulous prices for romantic spots, and I think would have bought the entire Border if the times had become safer, in those scant seven years that were left to him. Even Scott could be mistaken, for he bought what he believed was Huntlie Bank, where True Thomas had his love affair with the fair ladye-- "True Thomas lay on Huntlie Bank; A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e; And there he saw a ladye bright Come riding down by the Eildon tree. "Her skirt was o' the grass-green silk, Her mantle o' the velvet fyne; At ilka tett o' her horse's mane Hung fifty siller bells and nine." And now the experts tell us that it is not Huntlie Bank at all, but that is in an entirely different direction, over toward Ercildoune and the Rhymer's Tower.