come unbidden to my mind. Ah, yes! it is in the weird music of “Christabel” that the name of the long-dead baron is interwoven, and perhaps his “castle good” was the predecessor of Naworth. There are other elaborate tombs of the Dacres and Howards, and there is a world of pathos in Sir Edward Boehm’s terra cotta effigy of little Elizabeth, daughter of the present earl, who died in 1883. It is the figure of an infant child asleep, with one little rounded arm thrown above the head and the other folded gracefully on the breast, while a quiet smile plays over the dimpled face—
But come—it is late, and Lanercost Priory would be gloomy enough on such a day without the infant figure. We retrace our way through the ivy-mantled portal and hasten through the park to the Carlisle road, which shortly brings us to the border city, and grateful indeed is the old-fashioned hospitality of the County Hotel, one of the most pleasant among the famous inns of the North Country.
[XIII]
ACROSS THE TWEED
Gretna Green is a disappointingly modern-looking hamlet, and has little to accord with the romantic associations that its name always brings up. In olden days it gained fame as a place where marriages were accomplished with an ease and celerity that is rivalled in our time only by the dissolution of the tie in some of our own courts. Hither the eloping couples hastened from England, to be united with scarcely other ceremony than mutual promises—witnesses were not required—and a worthy blacksmith did a thriving business merely by acting as clerk to record the marriages. The ceremony was legally valid in Scotland and therefore had to be recognized in England, according to mutual agreement of the nations to recognize each other’s institutions. But today Gretna Green’s ancient source of fame and revenue has vanished; no Young Lochinvars flee wildly across the Solway to its refuge; it is just a prosaic Scotch village, whose greatest excitement is occasioned by the motor cars that sweep through on the fine Edinburgh road.
Quite different is the fame of Ecclefechan, a few miles farther—a mean-looking village closely skirting the road for a half-mile. Typically Scotch in its bleakness and angularity, it seems fittingly indeed the birthplace of the strange genius who was, in some respects, the most remarkable man of letters of the last century. Thomas Carlyle was born here in 1795 and sleeps his last sleep, alone, in the village kirkyard, for Jane Welsh is not buried by his side. As we came into the town, we paused directly opposite the whitewashed cottage where the sage was born and which is still kept sacred to his memory. The old woman caretaker welcomed us in broadest Scotch and showed us about with unalloyed pride and satisfaction. Here are gathered mementoes and relics of Carlyle—books, manuscripts and pictures; the memorial presented him in 1875, bearing the signature of almost every noted literary contemporary; the wreath sent by Emperor William in 1895 to be laid on the grave; and other things of more or less curious significance. The cottage itself is a typical home of the Scotch villager, the tiny rooms supplied with huge fireplaces and the quaint old-time kitchen still in daily use by the caretaker. The house was built by Carlyle’s father, a stonemason by trade, to whose “solid honest work” the distinguished son was wont proudly to refer on divers occasions. The motor car is awakening Ecclefechan to the fact that it is the birthplace of a man famous the world over, for they told us that many visitors now came like ourselves.
There are no finer stretches of road in Scotland than the broad, beautifully engineered highway from Carlisle to Lanark, winding among the hills with grades so gentle as to be almost imperceptible. The rain, which followed us since we left Carlisle, has ceased and many panoramas of hill and valley lie before us. Oftentimes the low-hung clouds partially obscure the view, but aside from this the scene stretches away clear and sharp to the gray belt of the horizon. We are passing through the hills of Tintock Moor, which Burns has sung as
“Yon wild mossy mountains so lofty and wide
That nurse in their bosom the youth of the Clyde.”