"True Thomas lay on Huntlie Bank;
A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e;
And there he saw a ladye bright
Come riding down by the Eildon tree.
"Her skirt was o' the grass-green silk,
Her mantle o' the velvet fyne;
At ilka tett o' her horse's mane
Hung fifty siller bells and nine."
And now the experts tell us that it is not Huntlie Bank at all, but that is in an entirely different direction, over toward Ercildoune and the Rhymer's Tower.
There is a satisfaction in this to those of us who believe in fairies and in Scott. For fairies have no sense of place or of time. And of course if they knew that Scott wished them to have lived at his Huntlie Bank, they straightway would have managed to have lived there. Always, as you go through this land of romance, or any romance land, and wise dull folk dispute, you can console yourself that Scott also was mistaken(?).
The castle began with a small cottage, not this great pile of gray stone we can see from the railway carriage across the Tweed, into which we make our humble way through a wicket gate, a restrained walk, and a basement doorway. "My dreams about my cottage go on," he wrote to Joanna Baillie, as we all dream of building cottages into castles. "My present intention is to have only two spare bedrooms," but "I cannot relinquish my Border principles of accommodating all the cousins and duniwastles, who will rather sleep on chairs, and on the floor, and in the hay-loft, than be absent when folks are gathered together."
So we content ourselves with being duniwastles, whatever that may be, and are confident that Sir Walter if he were alive would give us the freedom of the castle.
In any event, if we feel somewhat robbed of any familiar intercourse, we can remember that Ruskin called this "perhaps the most incongruous pile that gentlemanly modernism ever designed." This may content the over-sensitive who are prevented ever hearing the ripple of the Tweed through the windows.
Scott was a zealous relic hunter, and if you like relics, if you can better conjure up persons through a sort of transubstantiation of personality that comes by looking on what the great have possessed, there can be few private collections more compelling than this of Abbotsford.
In the library are such significant hints for reconstruction as the blotting book wherewith Napoleon cleared his record, the crucifix on which Queen Mary prayed, the quaigh of her great great and last grandson, the tumbler from which Bobbie Burns drank—one of them—the purse into which Rob Roy thrust his plunder, the pocket book of Flora MacDonald, which held nothing I fear from the generosity of the Bonnie Prince.
THE STUDY, ABBOTSFORD.