Now that we have reached Melrose, let us go at once to the old Abbey, and view that ruined pile in which repose the body of Douglass and the heart of Bruce, and around which the bard of Abbotsford loved to linger. This old church, or abbey, which for hundreds and hundreds of years resounded with the songs and prayers of monks and Catholic priests, was demolished by the Protestants in the time of the Reformation, and now serves only as the dwelling-place of blind bats and hooting owls. After spending three hours in and around the Abbey, and regretting that we cannot linger three days, we leave, feeling that we can fully appreciate, and heartily adopt the sentiment expressed in the second canto of “The Lay of the Last Minstrel:”
“If thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright.
Go visit it by the pale moonlight;
And, home returning, soothly swear,
Was never seen so sad and fair.”
MELROSE ABBEY.
We now retrace our steps toward Gallashields; and, on reaching there, are met by the Rev. Mr. Thompson, a Baptist preacher, who takes us to his house, and treats us so kindly that I really regret my inability to accept his kind invitation to remain until Sunday and preach for him.
I sincerely regret that my stay in Scotland has ended. I am loath to leave. I have walked two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles through the Highlands. I have viewed the whole country through a veil of poesy which the hands of Scott and Burns have thrown over it. To me, it is indeed “Bonnie Scotland;” and in leaving it I can but say:
“Farewell to the land where the clouds love to rest,
Like the shroud of the dead on the mountains’ cold breast;
To the cataracts’ roar, where the eagles reply,
And the lakes their broad bosoms expand to the sky.”
The night passes; morning comes. The day is bright and beautiful. I now bid adieu to bonnie Scotland, and set my face, for the first time, toward merry England. It is Saturday. Hence, I go direct to Manchester, so as to be there on Sunday. Manchester has almost a million inhabitants. It is the greatest cotton-manufacturing city in the world. The great English Exposition was opened in Manchester by the Prince and Princess of Wales, a few days ago, and will not close for some weeks yet. I have attended exhibitions in New Orleans, Atlanta, Louisville, Washington City, Philadelphia and Boston, and the main difference between an American exposition and an English one is that in America we make a specialty of fruits, seeds, agricultural products and implements, fine wood, valuable timbers, gold and silver ore, etc., while in England the specialties are emblems of royalty, relics of antiquity, and products of the loom and spindle.
The manufacturers of Manchester know much more about cotton than do Southern planters in the United States. They know each spring how much cotton is planted. They study carefully the crop prospects. They have approximately correct ideas as to what the yield will be. They then estimate the demand, and calculate the price. Most of these men manufacture goods to order. When one buys a thousand bales of cotton, he knows exactly how much money it will cost to work it up, how much goods it will turn out, how much waste there will be, and how much profit he is to reap. The people here say that the speculators of New York frequently buy up great quantities of cotton and hold it for better prices. To counteract this, a paper is addressed to the cotton manufacturers of England, and circulated through the country. Those signing this petition agree thereby to run their factories only half the time until the next cotton crop is put on the market.