for the hillsides. The alder fringed the streams. Being comparatively free from sheep and cattle, their forms were no doubt more bushy and rounded than we now find them on the pastured haughs and hills. They would form a dense underwood. Mingled with these, and generally towering above them, was the Scotch fir, the ash, and the oak. Add to these an undergrowth of raspberry and wild rose on the braes, the juniper, the bracken, the fern, interspaces of the strong-spreading common heather,--and you have a fair picture of what these southern valleys and uplands were in the time when Lowland Scotland was shared by Cymri, Angle, and Scandinavian, ere Scotland itself had grown into a kingdom, and even for centuries afterwards, until sheep and axe and natural decay completed the sweeping away of the native forest.1 Down through the time of the Stuarts even, the district was a well-wooded shelter for hart and hind, for doe and roe:

"Ettricke foreste is a feir foreste,

In it grows many a semelie trie;
There's hart and hynde, and dae and rae,
And of a' wild bestis grete plentie.

The King was comin' through Caddon Ford,
And full five thousand men was he;
They saw the derke foreste them before,

They thought it awesome for to see." 2

1 For an interesting account of the native trees of the forest, see a paper entitled Howebottom, by Rev. James Farquharson of Selkirk, Berwickshire Club, 1878. John of Fordun corroborates the view of the text: "Quorum vero montium circa radices nemora sunt ingentia, cervis, damulis, aliisque feris silvestribus diversa generis et bestiis referta."-Scotorum Historia, vii. 590 (ed. Gale).

2 The Ballad of the Outlaw Murray.

The reference here is without doubt to the early part of the sixteenth century, to the time of James IV. ere he went to Flodden. The forest of Meggat or Rodono on one occasion yielded 500 head of game-bird and beast of chase and at another time eighteen score of deer, as late as the days of James V. and Mary; and we know that the red-deer abounded for centuries all over the Lowland hills, where they were hunted by horse, hound, and horn. In the time of Mary we have a proclamation limiting and prohibiting the slaughter of deer in the forest on account of their growing scarcity (August 1566); and there was a similar order in June 1576. Evidently the deer were dying, or rather being shot, out. The Lochs of Sinton and Haining have yielded antlers of the red-deer and remains of the Bos primigenius. Horns of the elk are said to have been found in Mount Bog, Kirkurd, Peeblesshire.1

It is this bareness of green hillside, emphasised, not relieved, by an occasional dwarfed thorn, birk, or rowan, suggestive of the forest now swept away, which gives in great measure the charm of pathos to the hopes and glens of Yarrow and Ettrick. It was this feature which impressed both Wordsworth and Scott, especially the latter, whose fancy thrilled to the past with its touching contrast:

VOL. I.

"Yon Thorn,-perchance whose prickly spears
Have fenced him for three hundred years,
While fell around his green compeers,-
Yon lonely Thorn, would he could tell
The changes of his parent dell,

1 New Statistical Account, Peeblesshire, 128.

B

Since he, so grey and stubborn now,
Waved in each breeze a sapling bough:
Would he could tell how deep the shade
A thousand mingled branches made;
How broad the shadows of the oak,
How clung the rowan to the rock,

And through the foliage showed his head
With narrow leaves and berries red."

Early in this century "a person of quality" from England, having visited Tweeddale, was asked on his return home to describe the district. His answer was that this was easy enough; it could be done in three words" a Hill, a Road, and a Water." This brief account was no doubt very characteristic of the district at that period; for in the early part of the century there was almost nothing but natural wood, and very little of that, except at Neidpath and Dawyck. Some birks, hazels, and rowans clustered on the hillsides, and in the glens beside the burn-pools; and, as now, there were some alders by the Tweed. Since then there has been a great deal of planting, but, unfortunately, not of a commendable sort. Most of the plantations are absolutely monotonous, wholly fir or larch, unrelieved by the slightest mixture of other trees. Here and there, particularly on the heights that surround the House of Dawyck, there appear, as the product of a cultured yet natural taste, woods rich in variety of leafage, and set in wonderfully harmonious outlines.1 But, taking the valley as a whole, it was more pleasing to the eye in last century, ere the hand of man had touched and

1 These woods were designed and planted by the late proprietor, Sir John Murray Naesmyth.

marred it. The slopes of the hills that ran down to the great haugh of the Tweed were, as yet, green pastoral braes, unbroken by plough and harrow, and unadorned by masses of larch poles, each looking like a half-opened umbrella in summer, and the whole like a dull brown. blanket in autumn. The heights of the district did not then show as if they had been curiously patched in needy places by bits of cloth different from their original. garment, and they were free from shapes of wood that now look like arms minus bodies, again like bodies minus arms, now like a tadpole, and then like a soup-ladle. The people of last century were spared appearances of this sort, and instead of these they had simply hills, roads, and waters. We may, however, in an æsthetical interest, be thankful that, notwithstanding unshapely planting and ambitious uptearing of the hillsides, the salient features of Tweeddale are still the natural ones -" the Hills and the Waters." To get a picture in our mind of the district, we must take up these, and combine them; and the best way of doing this is to get actually or in imagination to the summit of our highest main ridge of hills. Let us suppose, then, that we have got somehow to the top of Broad Law, which is 2754 feet above sea-level. We are now on the summit of the range of mountains of the greatest average height in the south of Scotland. The range is seen to run eastward, with the valley of the Tweed on the north, and that of the Meggat on the south, through the heights of Cramalt Craig, Dun Law, and Dollar Law. At the Dollar Law, it branches to the north-east through Pykestone and Scrape, until it disappears in the haugh of the Tweed at Barns;

and at the same point it slopes round Manorhead to the south-east, and rises gradually into the series of hills. which run from the head of Glengaber Burn, under the names of the Blackhouse and Hundleshope Heights, and branch off at the head of Glensax through the Dun Rig into the Newby ridge; having the valley of the Yarrow on the south, and that of the Manor on the north. This high mountain-land is the backbone of Tweeddale. From it flow, to the north-east, its principal glens and streams; and from it, in the course of ages, have been worn down by ice-action and by water those alluvial deposits that make the fertile haugh-land of the valley of the Tweed, and the rich verdure in the hollows of the waters and burns.

Once on the summit of the height, we find immediately around us a vast level plain, with short and scanty herbage, chiefly hill-mosses and lichens. All trace and feeling. of man, of planting, ploughing, building, have disappeared. We are absolutely alone-alone with earth and sky, save for the occasional cry of a startled sheep and the summer hum of insects on the hill-top

"That undefined and mingled hum,
Voice of the desert, never dumb."

Here and there a very tiny yellow-faced tormentilla, a very slender blue-eyed harebell, or a modest hill violet, peeps timorously out on the barrenness, like an orphan that has strayed on the wild. But we look around us from this great height, and what strikes the eye? On all sides, but particularly to the east of us, innumerable rounded broad hill-tops run in series of parallel flowing