The bard of Reull he slew.
On Teviot’s side in fight they stood,
And tuneful hands were stained with blood,”
and so forth. But the minstrel’s memory had etherealised the facts. The squalid prose of the story is that a drunken brawl arose at Newmill, on the Teviot, between Willie and a rival from Rule Water, known as Sweet Milk; that they fought it out there and then; and that Sweet Milk was slain on the spot.
Above Kelso—to return, with apologies, to the Tweed—the valley opens out, and the trees grow thicker, while the larch and the fir begin to come more into evidence. At Mertoun House, Lord Polwarth’s seat, environed with groves, one of those Introductions to the cantos of “Marmion” which so hamper the movement of the poem, while they contain some of the poet’s finest lines, is dated. Sir Walter was passing Christmas here, and even then, when the boughs were all leafless, “Mertoun’s halls” were fair. In another of the Introductions much that is interesting in a biographical sense is said about the large gabled tower which, as it stands four-square to all the winds that blow, is one of the most prominent objects in the landscape for miles along the valley. It is the Smailholm Tower of the mystical “Eve of St. John,” and is built among a cluster of crags a few miles north of the stream, in the parish which contains Sandyknowe, a farmhouse leased by Sir Walter’s paternal grandfather from Scott of Harden. Thus it happened that from his third to his eighth year young Walter was often sojourning in the parish of Smailholm; and long afterwards, as the shattered tower and crags amid which the “lonely infant” had strayed and mused until the fire burned, rose up before him in vision, he confessed the poetic impulse which came to him in this “barren scene and wild.” The tower, anciently the property of the Pringles of Whytbank, now of Lord Polwarth, is a typical Border peel—not a castle, but simply a large square keep of enormous strength, the walls being nine feet thick; the chambers built over one another in three storeys, with communication by a narrow circular stair; the roof a platform; the whole enclosed by an outer wall. Much nearer the river, on the other side, is another Border strength, Littledean Tower, the keep of the Kers of Nenthorn; and close at hand stands the old shaft of the village cross, where in more stirring days than these, at the “jowing” of the bell, the men of the barony, armed with sword and lance, and sometimes with a “Jethart stave” (the Scots never took kindly to the twanging of the yew), would assemble in their hundreds to guard their own byres, or, mounted on their vigorous little ponies, to prick across the Border to empty their neighbours’, and belike to ruin them “stoop and roop.”
MELROSE ABBEY, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST.
The huge three-coned hill which can be seen from below Kelso, and remains in sight for many miles, although it is constantly shifting from left to right, from front to rear, so mazy is the way of the stream, is, of course, the famous Eildon. Tradition says that it was split into three by the magician Scott, not Sir Walter of that ilk, but “the wondrous Michael,” more formally, Sir Michael Scott of Balwearie. Indeed, most of the more striking phenomena in these parts are ascribed to “Auld Michael” when they are not credited to “Auld Nickie” or Sir William Wallace. The theory is that he was under the constant necessity of finding employment for a spirit with an enormous appetite for work. On one occasion he bade him “bridle the Tweed with a curb of stone;” and the dam-head at Kelso, constructed in a single night, was the result. The division of Eildon into three was another night’s task; and it was not till he had set the industrious demon making ropes out of sea-sand that he himself could find any rest. If these incidents have a legendary look about them, it is certain that Sir Michael himself was no myth. He was profoundly versed in all the learning of the Dark Age; and it is probable that he was one of the ambassadors who sailed “to Noroway o’er the faem” to bring about the return of Alexander’s fair daughter. If he was less of a magician than his distant descendant, it was through no fault of his own. He was a diligent student of all the abstruse sciences, and wrote freely about them; and he was credited with uncanny attributes by the learned as well as by the vulgar of his day. While Sir Walter was in Italy he was complaining that the great Florentine had thought none but Italians worthy of being sent to hell. He was reminded that he of all men had no right to grumble, since his ancestor figures among the magicians and soothsayers of the “Inferno.”
MELROSE ABBEY: THE EAST WINDOW.