It was the followers of the Reformed Faith that next held public worship there. Did no one of the old-time Abbots who lie asleep within its ancient walls turn in his grave, one wonders, when in 1793 the south aisle was pulled down, and "a wall built between the pillars to make the church more comfort able"?
[Original]
They had no room in their compositions for any sentiment of reverence, little use for such a thing as respect for historical buildings, those eighteenth century Scottish ancestors of ours. Our old foes of England at least had the excuse that what they did was done in the heat of conflict; it was left to our own people in cold blood to lay sacrilegious hands on a glorious relic of the past; like monkeys to deface and tear to pieces something the beauty and value of which they had not wit to recognise. All that could be done, however, to atone for past misdeeds was done in 1875 by the Marquess of Lothian. The "comfortable church" of 1793 has been removed, and what remains of the Abbey is reverently cared for. Safe now from further desecration,
"The shadows of the convent towers
Slant down the snowy sward;"
and in the peace of long-drawn summer twilights only the distant cries of children, the scream of swift or song of thrush, may now set the echoes flying through those ruined aisles. The Presbyterian Manse that once stood in the Abbey grounds—itself no doubt, like other houses in the town, built wholly or in part of stone quarried from the Abbey ruins—has long since been removed, and little now remains which may break the tranquil sadness that broods over these relics of past grandeur.
A few hundred yards from the Abbey, down a back street, there stands a picturesque old house, robbed now of some of its picturesqueness by the substitution of tiles for the old thatched roof that once was there. It is the house where, in a room in the second story whose window overlooks a pleasant garden and the once crystal Jed, Mary, Queen of Scots lay many days, sick unto death,—a house surely that should now be owned and cared for by the Burgh. Local tradition (for what it may be worth) has it that the Queen lodged first in the house which is now the Spread Eagle Hotel, but that a fire breaking out there, she was hastily removed to that which now goes by the name of "Queen Mary's House." It stands in what must in her day have been a beautiful garden, sloping to the river. Hoary, moss-grown apple trees still blossom there and bear fruit. "With its screen of dull trees in front," says Dr. Robert Chambers, "the house has a somewhat lugubrious appearance, as if conscious of connection with the most melancholy tale that ever occupied the page of history." In those long past days, however, its appearance must have been far from lugubrious; and indeed even now, on a pleasant sunny evening of late spring when thick-clustered apple and pear blossom drape the boughs, and thrushes sing, and Jed ripples musically beneath the worn arches of that fine