Scott also knew Kelso as the place of his first law practice, and of his honeymoon. Here flowered into maturity that long lavish life, so enriched and so enriching of the Border.
Horatio Bonar was minister here for thirty years—I wondered if he wrote here, "I was a wandering sheep."
While James Thomson, who wrote "The Seasons," but also "Rule, Britannia"—if he was a Scotsman; perhaps this was an Act of Union—
"Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves!"
was born at a little village nearby, back in the low hills of Tweed, in 1700, seven years before the Union.
Jedburgh
From Kelso I took train to the Border town which even the Baedeker admits has had "a stormy past," and where the past still lingers; nay, not lingers, but is; there is no present in Jedburgh. It is but ten miles to the Border; more I think that at any other point in all the blue line of the Cheviot, is one conscious of the Border; consciousness of antiquity and of geography hangs over Jedburgh.
It lies, a hill town, on the banks of the Jed; "sylvan Jed" said Thomson, "crystal Jed" said Burns; a smaller stream than the Tweed, more tortuous, swifter, rushing through wilder scenery, tumultuous, vocative, before Border times began—if ever there were such a time before—and disputatious still to remind us that this is still a division in the kingdom.
One of the most charming walks in all Scotland—and I do not know of any country where foot-traveler's interest is so continuous (I wrote this before I had read the disastrous walking trip of the Pennell's)—is up this valley of the Jed a half dozen miles, where remnants of old forest, or its descendants, still stand, where the bracken is thick enough to conceal an army crouching in ambush, where the hills move swiftly up from the river, and break sharply into precipices, with crumbling peel towers, watch towers, to guard the heights, and where outcropping red scars against the hill mark sometimes the entrance to caves that must have often been a refuge when Border warfare tramped down the valley.
In Jedburgh we lodged not at the inn; although the name of Spread Eagle much attracted us; but because every one who had come before us had sought lodging, we, too, would "lodge," if it be but for a night.