The Spell of Scotland. Keith Clark

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!

      Far across the shimmering green meadows and through the fragrant orchards came the sound of bagpipes—on this my first evening in Scotland! And whether or not you care for the pipes, there is nothing like them in a Scottish twilight, a first Scottish twilight, to reconstruct all the Scotland that has been.

      The multitudes and the individuals came trooping back. At a time of famine these very fields were filled with huts, four thousand of them, for always the monks had food, and always they could perform miracles and obtain food; which they did. That for the early time. And for the late, the encampment of Leslie's men in these fields before the day when they slaughtered Montrose's scant band of royalists at Philipshaugh, and sent that most splendid figure in late Scottish history as a fugitive to the north, and to the scaffold.

      I knew that in the Abbey before the high altar lay the high heart of The Bruce, which had been carried to Spain and to the Holy Land, by order of Bruce, since death overtook him before he could make the pilgrimage. Lord James Douglass did battle on the way against the Moslems in southern Spain, where "a Douglass! a Douglass!" rang in battle clash against "Allah, illah, allah," and the Douglass himself was slain. The heart of The Bruce flung against the infidel, was recovered and sent on to Jerusalem, and then back to Melrose. The body of Douglass was brought back to Scotland, to St. Bride's church in Douglass, and his heart also lies before the high altar of Melrose. "In their death they were not divided."

      There lies also buried Michael Scot

      "Buried on St. Michael's night,

       When the bell toll'd one and the moon was bright."

      On such a night as this, I hoped. And Scot is fit companion for the twilight. This strange wizard of a strange time was born in Upper Tweedale, which is the district of Merlin—the older wizard lies buried in a green mound near Drummelzier. Michael traveled the world over, Oxford, Paris, Bologna, Palermo, Toledo, and finally, perhaps because his wizardry had sent him like a wandering Jew from place to place, back to the Border, his home country, where he came and served the Evil One. Dante places him in the Purgatory of those who attempt blasphemously to tear the veil of the future. The thirteenth century was not the time in which to increase knowledge, whether of this world or the next. Even to-day perhaps we save a remnant of superstition, and we would not boast

      "I could say to thee

       The words that cleft the Eildon hills in three."

      

      Very dark against the gathering dark of the night sky rose the Eildon hills above, cleft in three by the wizardry of Scot. To that height on the morrow I should climb, for it is there that Sir Walter Scott, a later wizard, had carried our Washington Irving, just a century ago, and shown him all this Borderland—which lay about me under the increasing cover of night.

      "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—

      "If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright,

       Go visit it by the pale moonlight;

       For the gay beams of lightsome day

       Gild but to flout the ruins gray.

       When the broken arches are black in night,

       And each shafted oriel glimmers white,

       When the cold light's uncertain shower

       Streams on the ruined central tower;

       When buttress and buttress alternately

       Seem framed of ebon and ivory;

       When silver edges the imagery,