TANTALLON CASTLE AND BASS ROCK.
There is not much to remind one of the fiery parting between Douglas and Marmion so vividly described by Scott. But a mere shell of the castle remains; the draw-bridge of the ringing lines is gone, and the inner walls from which the retainers might have watched the fierce encounter have long since crumbled away. The courtyard where the doughty warriors engaged in their altercation is covered with grasses and starred with wild flowers. About all that remains as it was in the day of Douglas is the dungeon hewn from the solid rock beneath the walls. We wandered about the roofless, dripping ruins as the old keeper told us the story of the castle and pointed out the spots that have been identified with the song of Scott. Here stood the battlements from which the disconsolate Clare contemplated the desolate ocean—here was the chapel where Wilton was armed by old Archibald—
But the rain has ceased and blue rifts are coming in the sky. As we look oceanward, a mountainlike bulk rises dimly out of the dull waters. “Bass Rock,” says our guide, “and a peety it is that the sea is too rough for the boots today.” A weird island it is, less than a mile in circumference, rising to the stupendous height of four hundred feet, though it little looks it from Tantallon—our guess was less than a quarter as great. In old days the rock was quite inaccessible; it was early fortified and in later times was made a prison. Here was confined a group of the persecuted Covenanters, who lay in the damp, dark dungeons, “envying the freedom of the birds”—the gulls and wild geese that wheel almost in clouds about the rock. Dreadful times these—but to appreciate the real horror of such a fate one would have to stand on Bass Rock when the storm walks abroad and the wild German Ocean wraps the rock in the white mist of the angry waves. The rock serves little purpose now save as a site for a lighthouse, built a few years ago, and as a resort for curious tourists, who can visit it when the weather allows landing to be made.
Turning southward through the Lammermuir Hills, we find at the little village of East Linton a surprise in the Black Lion, another of those homelike and wonderfully comfortable Scotch inns which offer genuine cheer to the wayfarer. Here a fire dances in the grate and our luncheon is one that the more pretentious hotels do not equal. We resume our flight under leaden skies through the low gray mists that sweep the hilltops. Haddington is famed for its abbey church, very old and vast in bulk. Jane Welsh Carlyle is buried in its choir—for she chose to lie beside her father in her long sleep.
The moorland road to Melrose is finely engineered, following the hills in long sweeping lines with few steep grades or sharp curves. In places it is marked by rows of posts so that it may be followed when covered by the snows. Melrose Abbey, familiar from former visits, claims only a passing glance, as we hasten on to its old-time rival at Jedburgh, which is now somewhat off the beaten path and few know of the real interest of the town or the extent and magnificence of its abbey ruin, whose massive tower and high walls, pierced by three tiers of graceful windows, dominate any distant view of the place.
We brought the car up sharply on the steep hillside in front of the abbey and an old woman in a nearby cottage called to us to “gang right in—ye’ll find the keeper in the gardens.” And we did—surprised him at work with his flowers—a hale old man of seventy with bushy hair and beard, silver white, and a hearty Scotch accent that wins you at once. He dropped his garden tools and came forward with a quick, elastic step, greeting us as if we had been expected friends. When he espied the lady member of our party, he began to cut roses until he had made up quite a bouquet, which he gallantly presented her. Then he began a panegyric on Jedburgh and the abbey, assuring us that a stay of several days would be necessary to get even an idea of the ruins and the historic spots of the vicinity. His face visibly fell when we told him we must be off in an hour.
“Ah,” said he, “sic haste, sic haste to get back to England! Ye should bide longer in old Scotia and learn her history and her people. I grant ye England is a great nation, but the Scotch is the greater of the two.”
Then his enthusiasm got the better of him, and forgetting the abbey he began to point out the beauties of the valley of the Jed, over which we had a far-reaching view, and to recite snatches of the poetry of Burns appropriate to the scene. I had thought that I knew a little of the beauty and spirit of Burns, but it all seemed to take on new meaning from the lips of the quaint old Scotsman. It was worth a journey to Jedburgh, and a long one, to hear him recite it. Then he began to point out the things of interest about the abbey, and so many they seemed to him that he had difficulty in choosing which he should enlarge upon during our short stay. He showed us the Norman doorway, the most elaborate in the Kingdom, so remarkable that the Marquis of Lothian, the owner of the abbey, has caused an exact duplicate to be made in the wall near by to preserve the wonderful detail nearly obliterated in the original. He led us among the great pillars, still intact, springing up into the mighty arches of the nave, and pointed out the gracefulness of the numerous windows with slender stone mullions. There are many notable tombs, among them one with a marble effigy of the late Marquis of Lothian, a really superb work of art, by George Frederick Watts. Nor did he forget the odd gravestones in the churchyard with epitaphs in quaint and halting verse, telling of the virtues of the long-forgotten dead, of one of whom it was declared:
“Here Lyes a Christian Bold and True,
An antipode to Babel’s Creu,
A Friend to Truth, to Vice a Terrour;
A Lamp of Zeal opposing Errour.
Who fought the Battels of the Lamb,
Of Victory now Bears the Palm.”
And there is another stone with a threat as grim as that of the Bard of Avon, for the epitaph expresses the wish that