I think could ill have brooked this twentieth century rush and hurry; she was spared the trial of finding the pure air of St. Mary's poisoned by the stench of petrol fumes. A native of Ettrick, born in 1782, Tibbie lived at her home in Yarrow till the summer of 1878, and she lies in the same kirk-yaird that "haps" all that is mortal of James Hogg. And here by the loch, almost at her door, with plaid around him, the Shepherd sits in effigy, as Christopher North predicted to him in 1824, with "honest face looking across St. Mary's Loch and up towards the Grey Mare's Tail, while by moonlight all your own fairies will weave a dance round its pedestal."
They were weird things, those box beds, that have been mentioned as still existing in Tibbie Shiel's cottage, weird, and responsible for much ill-health, more especially one would suppose, for consumption. They were built into the wall of a room, and they had wooden doors that could be drawn close at night, entirely cutting them off from the room, and jealously excluding every breath of fresh air. Some had a very small sliding trap, or eyelet hole, in one of the doors, opening at the side just above the pillow, but the custom was, as I understand, to shut even that. The box-bed was of old almost universal in peasants' cottages in the Border. No doubt it gave a certain amount of privacy to the occupant or occupants, but what countless forms of disease it must have fostered! The present writer can remember the case of a young man of twenty-five or so, who, to the puzzled wonder of his friends, died of a galloping consumption. "I canna think hoo he could hae gotten't," said his sister to the daughter of her mistress. "He was aye that carefu' o' himsel'. Od! he wad hap himself up that warm, an' he aye drew the doors o' his bed close, an' shuttit the verra keek-hole. Na! I canna think hoo he could hae catched it."
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To add to the sanitary joys of those homes of disease germs, it was, too, the almost universal custom to use the space below the bed as a kind of store house. The writer can remember as a boy to have seen in one of the most decent and respectable of such cottages, bags of potatoes stowed under the sleeping place occupied by a husband and wife! Quitting now the Loch, and following the road that leads down Yarrow to Selkirk, on our left, half a mile or so from the road and overhanging the burn, stands the massive little tower of Dryhope. This was the birthplace, about the year 1550, of the beautiful Mary Scott, the Flower of Yarrow, bride of Scott of Harden. I suppose that Harden must have succeeded his father-in-law in the possession of Dryhope, for in 1592, James VI issued orders to demolish the tower of Dryhope, "pertaining to Walter Scott of Harden who was art and part of the late treasonable act perpetuate against His Highness' own person at Falkland." James' instructions, however, cannot have been carried out very effectually, if at all, for Dryhope, though roofless, is in rather better preservation than are the majority of Border peels.
And now, on the far side of Yarrow, we pass Altrive, the farm which, from 1814 till his death in 1835, Hogg leased from the Duke of Buccleuch, at a merely nominal rent. Here, as Allan Cunningham said, he had "the best trout in Yarrow, the finest lambs on its braes, the finest grouse on its hills, and as good as a sma' still besides." Indeed he must almost have needed a "sma' still," in order effectually to entertain the crowds of people who came here unasked, to visit him, once he had established his reputation as a Hon. The tax on him must have been even heavier in proportion than it was on Sir Walter at Abbotsford.
Farther down, by the intersection of the cross road that leads over to Traquair and Tweed, there is the Gordon Arms, snuggest of fishing quarters, where in the endless twilights of June and July you may lie long awake, yet half steeped in sleep, listening contentedly to the wavering trill of whaups floating eerily over the hill in the still night air; or in the lightest dreamland you forecast the basket of tomorrow. It was here, at the Gordon Arms, that Scott and Hogg parted for the last time in the autumn of 1830, when the waters were already rising high that were so soon to close over Sir Walter's head. Slowly they walked together a mile down the road, Scott leaning heavily on Hogg's shoulder, and "I cannot tell what it was," wrote the latter afterwards, "but there was something in his manner that distressed me.
