goods. The children long remembered the leave-taking as one
of pure grief, for the villagers were much attached both to Scott and
to his wife, who had made herself greatly beloved by her untiring
goodness to the sick among her poor neighbours. But Scott himself
describes the migration as a scene in which their neighbours found no
small share of amusement. "Our flitting and removal from Ashestiel
baffled all description; we had twenty-five cartloads of the veriest
trash in nature, besides dogs, pigs, ponies, poultry, cows, calves,
bare-headed wenches, and bare-breeched boys."[25]

To another friend Scott wrote that the neighbours had "been much
delighted with the procession of my furniture, in which old swords,
bows, targets, and lances, made a very conspicuous show. A family of
turkeys was accommodated within the helmet of some _preux chevalier_
of ancient border fame; and the very cows, for aught I know, were
bearing banners and muskets. I assure your ladyship that this caravan
attended by a dozen of ragged rosy peasant children, carrying
fishing-rods and spears, and leading ponies, greyhounds, and spaniels,
would, as it crossed the Tweed, have furnished no bad subject for the
pencil, and really reminded me of one of the gipsy groups of Callot
upon their march."[26]

The place thus bought for 4000_l._,--half of which, according to Scott's
bad and sanguine habit, was borrowed from his brother, and half raised on
the security of a poem at the moment of sale wholly unwritten, and not
completed even when he removed to Abbotsford--"Rokeby"--became only too
much of an idol for the rest of Scott's life. Mr. Lockhart admits that
before the crash came he had invested 29,000_l._ in the purchase of land
alone. But at this time only the kernel of the subsequent estate was
bought, in the shape of a hundred acres or rather more, part of which ran
along the shores of the Tweed--"a beautiful river flowing broad and bright
over a bed of milk-white pebbles, unless here and there where it darkened
into a deep pool, overhung as yet only by birches and alders." There was
also a poor farm-house, a staring barn, and a pond so dirty that it had
hitherto given the name of "Clarty Hole" to the place itself. Scott
renamed the place from the adjoining ford which was just above the
confluence of the Gala with the Tweed. He chose the name of Abbotsford
because the land had formerly all belonged to the Abbots of Melrose,--the
ruin of whose beautifu