who were aware that in her younger days she had flirted with our father, knew that she had seen ninety years. But oh, how green and vigorous her old age was, both in body and mind! and how fresh and warm were all her affections!... How interesting were the old stories that she told! how easily were they narrated in the purest Scottish vernacular, and how perfectly did she bring back and vivify people, of whom we had heard much, but whom we had not lived early enough to know personally!" The old friend whom Sir Thomas describes so touchingly was Miss Menie Trotter, one of the last of the race of old Scotch ladies, so clever, so original, almost to eccentricity, so idiomatic and plain-spoken in their expressions, and yet such perfect gentlewomen. She was the sister of the laird of Morton Hall, and, though but slenderly endowed, her liberality and charitableness to her poorer neighbours was unbounded.[21] All her life she was a very active woman. Every morning she bathed in the Jordan, which then ran pure and sparkling through her garden, and afterwards she walked all over Blackford Hill before breakfast. Ten miles at a stretch was nothing to her within a few years of her death, which happened when she was above ninety. [21] Miss Menie was of a very hospitable disposition. At the beginning of every winter she killed and salted down a Highland bullock, which she and her guests ate steadily through till it was finished. Lady Robert Kerr, and my two great-grand-aunts, Mrs. Mackenzie and Mrs. David Wauchope, constantly dined with her, and she used to press her neighbour, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, to come, with the reminder, "We we getting gey near the tail noo." The railway has shorn the old place of many of its attractions; and the road now runs past it, and gradually mounts up to the red sandstone gateway which leads to Blackford Hill. The hill, which formerly belonged to Morton Hall, was bought by the town of Edinburgh in 1884, to form a great public park, chiefly by the exertions of Sir George Harrison, the then Lord Provost. Though no longer a lonely and sequestered spot, the wind blows as freshly over the hill, the view is as beautiful, and the whins and thorn trees grow as freely as when Sir Walter wrote his never-to-be-forgotten lines, which rise unbidden to the traveller's thoughts, as he slowly and wearily climbs to the highest rocky point-- Blackford! on whose uncultured breast, Among the broom, and thorn, and whin, A truant boy, I sought the nest, Or listed, as I lay at rest, While rose on breezes thin The murmur of the city crowd; And from his steeple jangling loud, Saint Giles's mingling din. Now from the summit to the plain, Waves all the hill with yellow grain; And o'er the landscape as I look, Nought do I see unchanged remain, Save the rude cliffs and chiming brook. To me they make a heavy moan, Of early friendships past and gone.[22] [22] Scott--"Marmion."