tance from the generations of
strenuous clansmen whose blood flows in their veins. Life in a
historical district is bound to have an ennobling effect on a man,
especially if he feels knit to the past by lineal descent from the
historical actors. A glamour of romance clings to hill and glen. The
dalesman you meet on the highway can tell you all the lore of his
parish, giving dates and citing illustrative lays. It is pleasant to
find that the stories of the Borderland are still known where they first
took birth, and that the local names, which to students instantly
suggest delightful bits of rhyme, have also to those who dwell near
them, a romance that is borrowed from the olden time.[13]

Anyone who has travelled in the shires that run along the Cheviots and
the Tweed, will conclude that poetry and romance may ever find a home
there. The hills, with their green pastoral slopes and abundant leafage,
are a delight to the eye in fresh spring and tinted fall. The sound of
the streams, as Ruskin has pointed out, is sweet and rhythmic to an
extraordinary degree, combining with the sough of the winds to form an
undersong of Nature's own melody. As the traveller drives or cycles
along the roads, he now and again gets such impressive vistas of
long-stretching waterways, wooded to the brink with graceful trees, as
grave themselves on the memory for evermore. For rock, crag, and dashing
linn, the northern Highlands are supreme; but in the green Borderland,
there is a more sedate and proportioned beauty. Nature is none the less
attractive for losing somewhat of her wildness and austerity.

[13] A favourite and appropriate book in this part of Scotland is
Wilson's _Tales of the Borders_. There are not many farm-houses
in the Lowlands of Scotland in which one does not find old
copies, bound and unbound, of Wilson's _Tales_. Usually they show
unmistakable evidence of having been frequently perused. One is
bound to admit that the modern reader, if he spends an evening
turning over these old pages, will find little reason to pride
himself on the superiority of the popular reading of to-day. The
short story, now in vogue, may be finely illustrated, and highly
sensational, but its matter is certainly inferior, as a rule, to
the general run of Wilson's stories. Wilson, in his humble way,
was a gleaner in the field so richly harvested by Sir Walter
Scott. _The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Bo