[Original]
Up Megget's left bank runs a hill road leading over into Tweedsmuir. It has been negotiated by motors, but it is far from being a desirable road for that form of traffic, or indeed for any except foot traffic. The surface is rough and hilly, and where it plunges down past Talla Linns it is exceedingly steep, and n places very soft.
Higher up the loch than Coppercleuch is the Rodono Hotel, and beyond, on the isthmus at the very head of St. Mary's, "Tibbie's," that famous little hostelry, haunt lang syne of Christopher North and Hogg; "Tibbie's," with its queer little antiquated box-beds, that I believe even yet exist. But it is not the "Tibbie Shiels" of North's day, or even of much later days; it has not the same simplicity; it has grown, and is no longer the simple little cottage into which Tibbie and her husband entered just ninety years ago this year of 1913.
[Original]
Robert Chambers described it in 1827 as "a small, neat house, kept by a decent shepherd's widow... It is scarcely possible to conceive anything more truly delightful than a week's ruralizing in this comfortable little mansion, with the means of so much amusement at the very door, and so many interesting objects of sight and sentiment lying closely around."
Perhaps in some ways it is as delightful now as ever; but motors and bicycles have changed its air, and its aspect. They seem as inconsistent with the air of "Tibbie's" as would be a railway train, or penny steamers on the loch. Necessarily, there is now about the place a more commercial air; it is no longer the mere cottage, with its simple fare of oatmeal porridge,—cooked as nowhere now it is cooked; milk, rich and frothy; of ham and eggs, the mere whiff of which would bring you in ravenous from loch or hill; of fresh caught trout fried in oatmeal and still sizzling as they were brought in. There are trout now as of old, no doubt, and hens yet lay eggs, and pigs are turned to bacon; but you eat now with a sense of having a train to catch, or a motor hurriedly to jump into; your eye seems to be ever on the clock, and the old air of leisure and of peace is gone. Tibbie Shiel herself departed in time. She who, when all the world was young, listened many a time to that Shepherd who had
"Found in youth a harp among the hills,
Dropt by the Elfin people,"