Out of the towns untald:
Lord! sic ane shout was them amang,
When they were owre the wald,
There west
Of Peebles to the play!"

Thirty years ago, the same joyousness prevailed in a thousand forms--in
hospitality, in festivity, in merry customs, in an exquisite social
sense, in the culture of the humorous and the imaginative, in
impressibility to every touch of noble and useful enthusiasm. It would
be easy to dilate upon the causes which seem to have produced this
choice joyous spirit in so unexpected a region as the far, bleak North:
but that would be a lengthened subject; and we must content ourselves at
present with the fact. And, instead of branching out into general vague
illustrations of what I mean by this lyric joyousness, I shall
_localise_ it, and embody the meaning in a sketch, light and imperfect
it must be, of a real place and a real life--such as mine own eyes
witnessed when a boy--and in the fond resuscitation of which, amidst the
usual struggles and anxieties allotted to middle age, memory and feeling
now find one of their most soothing exercises.

Let me transport the reader in imagination to the Vale of the Tweed,
that classic region--the Arcadia of Scotland, the haunt of the Muses,
the theme of so many a song, the scene of so many a romantic legend. And
there, where that most crystalline of rivers has attained the fulness of
its beauty and splendour--just before it meets and mingles in gentle
union with its scarce less beauteous sister, "sweet Teviot"--on one of
those finely swelling eminences which everywhere crown its banks, rise
the battlements of Fleurs Castle, which has long been the seat of the
Roxburghe family. It is a peerless situation; the great princely
mansion, ever gleaming on the eye of the traveller, at whatever point he
may be, in the wide surrounding landscape. It comes boldly out from the
very heart of an almost endless wood--old, wild, and luxuriant; having
no forester but nature--spreading right, left, and behind, away and
away, till lost in the far horizon. Down a short space in front, a green
undulating haugh between, roll the waters of the Tweed, with a bright
clear radiance to which the brightest burnished silver is but as dimness
and dross. On its opposite bank is a green huge mound--all that now
remains of the mighty old Roxburgh Castle, aforetime the military key of
Scotland, and within whose once towering precincts oft assembled the