[Original]
the ceaseless song of water gushing over the cauld and dashing among the boulders below; the wide expanse that carries the eye through the waving boughs over the gleaming belt of water, and away far up the hill purpling with the bloom of heather,—or late in the season, "grymed" with the new fallen snow,—up and over to the broad summit of the Three Brethren Cairn. In very truth it is itself a fairyland, and, standing here, to the mind comes,
[Original]
irresistibly, thought of the hidden Gold of Fairnilee that in boyhood one sought for so diligently.
[Original]
Then, higher up the river a mile or thereby, at the foot of Neidpath Hill, the long deep, swift hurrying stream in which, when autumn floods have done their work, there is not a yard where a lordly salmon may not be hooked. And higher still, there is Caddonfoot, and Clovenfords, in whose little inn Sir Walter used to stay before he lived at Ashiesteel; and the Nest, snug quarters of a famous Edinburgh Fishing Club, among whose members in old days was included the name of many an eminent Scot. Then opposite the Nest, across the river, Ashiesteel, which, almost more eloquently than even Abbotsford itself, speaks of Sir Walter. Here were spent the seven happiest years of his life; here he wrote the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," "Marnuon," and "The Lady of the Lake"; here came into his service those most faithful of followers, Mathieson (his coachman) and Tom Purdie, the latter, before the good fortune that brought him to the notice of "the Shirra," a most accomplished poacher of salmon. Who has not read, and smiled over, the tales that Scrope tells of him in his "Days and Nights of Salmon Fishing in Tweed?"
