And soon we are at St. Mary's Loch—which we have come to see. To one who comes from a land of lakes, from the Land of the Sky Blue Water, there must be at first a sudden rush of disappointment. This is merely a lake, merely a stretch of water. The hills about are all barren, rising clear and round against the sky. They fold and infold as though they would shield the lake bereft of trees, as though they would shut out the world. Here and there, but very infrequent, is a cluster of trees; for the most part it is water and sky and green heathery hills. The water is long and narrow, a small lake as our American lakes go, three miles by one mile; but large as it looms in romance, rich as it bulks in poetry.
INTERIOR VIEW, TIBBIE SHIEL'S INN.
Tibbie Shiel's is, of course, our goal. One says Tibbie Shiel's, as one says Ritz-Carlton, or the William the Conqueror at Dives. For this is the most celebrated inn in all Scotland, and it must be placed with the celebrated inns of the world. There is no countryside better sung than this which lies about St. Mary's, and no inn, certainly not anywhere a country inn, where more famous men have foregathered to be themselves. Perhaps the place has changed since the most famous, the little famed days, when Scott stopped here after a day's hunting, deer or Border song and story, up Meggatdale; and those famous nights of Christopher North and the Ettrick shepherd, nights deserving to be as famous as the Arabian or Parisian or London. The world has found it out, and times have changed, as a local poet complains—
"Sin a' the world maun gang
And picnic at St. Mary's."
The inn, a rambling white house, stands on a strip between two waters, added to no doubt since Tibbie first opened its doors, but the closed beds are still there—it was curious enough to see them the very summer that the Graham Moffatts played "Bunty" and "The Closed Bed"—and the brasses which Tibbie polished with such housewifely care.
For Tibbie was a maid in the household of the Ettrick shepherd's mother. She married, she had children, she came here to live. Then her husband died, and quite accidentally Tibbie became hostess to travelers, nearly a hundred years ago. For fifty-four years Tibbie herself ran this inn; she died in what is so short a time gone, as Scottish history goes, in 1878.
During that time hosts of travelers, particularly, wandered through the Border, came to this "wren's nest" as North called it. Hogg, of course, was most familiar, and here he wished to have a "bit monument to his memory in some quiet spot forninst Tibbie's dwelling." He sits there, in free stone, somewhat heavily, a shepherd's staff in his right hand, and in his left a scroll carrying the last line from the "Queen's Wake"—"Hath tayen the wandering winds to sing."
Edward Irving, walking from Kirkcaldy to Annan, was here the first year after Tibbie opened her doors so shyly. Carlyle, walking from Ecclefechan to Edinburgh, in his student days, caught his first glimpse of Yarrow from here—and slept, may it be, in one of these closed beds? Gladstone was here in the early '40's during a Midlothian campaign. Dr. John Brown—"Rab"—came later, and even R. L. S. knew the hospitality of Tibbie Shiel's when Tibbie was still hostess.
It is a long list and a brave one. In this very dining-room they ate simply and abundantly, after the day's work; in this "parlour" they continued their talk. And surely St. Mary's Lake was the same.