Basil had bought a volume of Scott's poems for me, to match the Burns's and he found in "Marmion"—where he knew it existed—a verse about the torrent:
Issuing forth one foamy wave,
And wheeling round the Giant's Grave,
White as a snowy charger's tail
Drives down the pass of Moffatdale.
So already we were coming into Scott's country. I remember Birkhill, because it's the watershed between the Moffat and the Yarrow, and the word "watershed" goes through my mind with a musical white rush, like a cataract. It suggests beautiful faraway things. Besides, there's another reason for remembering. Close by, at Dobbs Linn, the Covenanters used to hide in the time of the great persecution.
We swept through some bare, bleak country before coming to the Yarrow, but the rover brought us back to gentle, cultivated land, with thoughts of her favourite Wordsworth for Mrs. James; and soon we came to a very famous place, Tibbie Shiels's Inn. I had never heard of it, but that doesn't take from its fame! Basil and Mrs. James could both tell me how Scott, and Christopher North, and De Quincey, and a long list of other great men, used to meet at the house kept by Mrs. Richardson, "Tibbie," who outlived all the noble company, and was buried at last in the same churchyard with the Ettrick Shepherd.
By and by our road dropped down and down to the shores of lonely St. Mary's Loch (Scott wrote of it in "Marmion"), and at the end of the still lake to Dryhope Tower, where brave Mary Scott, his ancestress, "The Flower of Yarrow," had her birthplace.
So we went on to Selkirk on its hill overlooking Ettrick Water, and stopped just long enough to buy some of the celebrated "bannocks" for our picnic luncheon later on, and to have a glance at the statues of Sir Walter Scott and Mungo Park, the African traveller. Basil pretended to be shocked because I had never heard of him! "And you had never heard of Aline and me till you met us," he sighed, shaking his head. "I suppose you never heard of the sutors of Selkirk, either? The burly sutors who 'firmly stood' at Flodden when other 'pow'rful clans gave way'? Well, I'm glad, anyhow, that we aren't the only people you'd never heard of!"
Basil seemed very happy, and kind, and understanding, somehow, as if he saw that something was not quite right with me, and he wanted to console me as well as he could.
Sir S. had managed very clearly about not letting us stop to look at the town of Burns's death until we'd seen the place of his birth and traced out the path of his life-story; but he couldn't contrive the same kind of trip for Sir Walter Scott's country without going over the whole road twice. Besides, he wanted us to see Melrose by moonlight, and said it would be "incomparably better than Sweetheart Abbey." But I knew it wouldn't be better for me, and I didn't quite forgive him for thinking it possible, now that we had got so mixed up with irrelevant people.
We had to go to Jedburgh first, the place farthest south; then to Dryburgh; then flashing through Melrose to Abbotsford, where Scott died as well as lived; and then back to Melrose for the night. That was his plan; and I still supposed that we were to go on somewhere else next day—Sunday—not arriving in Edinburgh till Monday. But it seems that Sir S. had made up his mind to a different programme, though he said nothing about it then.
Things happened to the boys' car on the way to Jedburgh, though the road was good, and only undulating. Basil said that, as a matter of fact, he had "ill-wished" them and their auto, and as "thoughts are things," he had created the nail on which their tire came to grief. "Somerled and I want to be the only ones," he added mysteriously. "We'll have no interlopers." Which would have made me think him rather a frivolous person, after all, if he hadn't been so well up in the lore of the road, and known so many interesting things about Jedburgh, the county town of Roxburghshire.