named and arranged and localised the stars. of thoughts that glorified the dawn of her So sayeth Kit North, beadsman of Tweed-❘ prime. side. Does that man exist who is not in some degree the slave of the senses? Breathes there the man, with soul so alive, that he can bring night upon himself during day, day during night, to the utter extinction of sun, moon, and stars? No. Something external must touch the spirit to vivify her visions. The Swiss must hear the cow-song before he pines himself away in the malady of his mountains. The sailor who, when circumnavigating the globe, wept at the sight of a pewter spoon with the mark "London" upon it, had not wept at the often-repeated name, however dear the distant shore. And, to come nearer home, who can, sitting by his fireside in town, so envelop himself in imagination as to walk in moonlight, tender as the true, by the glittering sound of streams murmuring absolutely out of and along the green pory earth? Place a human being in a scene he has loved, and a million congregating feelings and fancies will convince him how weak is the creative power of the unassisted soul over its own spiritualities; a remembered stream is unsubstantial as the air-the remembered air a void. But the streams the eye sees and the ear hears murmur and glide and glitter with recollections. The past is as the present, and the gazer and listener is born again, and extends the wings of his youth as if in an atmosphere that knew not the deadening attraction of the earth. At such times, and in such places, all men are poets, and feel that the real world is as nothing, or, rather, but the framework of the world of imagination. Who has not felt something of this, although the forms round which the memory of his boyhood clings may, in his particular case, be different? But, reader, if thy early footsteps were free and unconfined over the beautiful bosom of the rejoicing earth, thou wilt understand the passion that the dream of some one solitary spot may inspire, rising suddenly up from oblivion in all its primeval loveliness, and making a silent appeal to thy troubled heart, in behalf of innocence evanished long ago and for ever. From the image of such spots you start away, half in love, half in fear, as from the visionary spectre of some dear friend dead and buried far beyond seas in a foreign country. Such power as this may there be in the little moorland rill oozing from the birchen brae-in some one of its fairy pools, that, in your lonely angling days, seemed to you more especially delightful as it swept sparkling and singing through the verdant wilderness-in some one deep streamless dell among a hundred, too insignificant to have received any name from the shepherds, but first discovered and enjoyed by you when the soul within you was bright with the stirred fire of young existence-in some sheltered retired nook, whither all the vernal hill-flowers had seemed to flock both for shadow and sunshine-in some greenest glade, far within the wood's heart, on which you had lain listening to the cushat crooning in his yew-grove-ay, in one and all of such places, and a thousand more, you feel that a power for ever dwells omnipotent over your spirit, adorned, expanded, strengthened, although it may now be with knowledge and science-a power extinguishing all present objects, and all their accompanying thoughts and emotions, in the inexpressibly pensive light of those blissful days when time and space were both bounded to a point by the perfect joy of the soul that existed in that NOW, happier than any angel in heaven. It would puzzle us to tell why the Tweed is to us the dearest of all the streams of Scotland. Our father's house stood not on its banks, nor on them played our infancy nor our boyhood. Perhaps we are thus able to love it with that unregretful and impassionate affection, without which the human spirit cannot find happiness in nature. Oh there are places on this earth that We know that there is one very short and we shudder to revisit, even in a waking dream, simple way of breaking all such delusions, and beneath the meridian sunshine. They are that is, to go in person to the scenes that inspire haunted by images too beautiful to be endured, them, and all our imaginative griefs and regrets and the pangs are dismal that clutch the heart will, it is said and sung, be changed at once into when approaching their bewildering boundaries, contemptuous laughter. We have in one or two for there it was that we roamed in the glorious instances made the experiment, but the effect novelty of nature when we were innocent and was not answerable to our expectation. True, uncorrupted. There it was that we lived in a that all things were less, both in bulk and world without shadows, almost without tears; | beauty, than we had believed; but that very disand after grief and guilt have made visitations covery aggravated our sorrow for the days that to the soul, she looks back in agony to those were gone. The lady-fern was still pretty, but blissful regions of time and space when she in those days a lady-fern grove was a fairy lived in Paradise. Nor are any flaming swords forest, and the insects that hung or sported there in the hands of cherubim needed to guard the in their gorgeous hues hardly seemed to belong gates, through which she dares not, if flung wide to our world. Wild-flowers there still were in open, now to enter in the abasement of her de- abundance, but in those days they so enamelled spair. Therefore she takes refuge in the dim the sward that we feared to tread among the and obscure light of common day, and seeks profusion, and spared the sacred wilderness of scenery not so mournfully haunted by the ghosts sweets, overcome by the sudden sense of thei rare and wonderful beauty. We recognised the burn-braes to be the same we had loved of yore; but the few bunches of wallflowers growing here and there among the gravelly soil looked stunted and disconsolate, all unlike to that glorious glow that dazzled our eyes when angling along the rapids, and that brought before our imagination the old ruined castle from which the seeds had been blown. The windings of the Yearn were romantic still, but the liquid labyrinths had lost their pleasant perplexities, and the small tufted islets amidst the broader streams or pools, once to our eyes so romantic, were only heaps of sand and weeds, whirled by eddies into a temporary obstruction to the waterflow. But enough was still there to justify our boyish spirit in all its blissful dreams. To justify it, did we say? Ay, to prove its heavenly power of transmutation and adornment, now that heavenly power was lost for ever, nor perhaps its place worthily supplied. We looked on a little angler leaping from stone to stone as we used to do of old, and sighed to know that the simple boy lived in such visions as we at his age had lived in too, but which now all melted away before the eyes of the understanding, and could no more be viewed by us now than the filmy ghosts of the dead. But, oh! feeling and imaginative reader-for such thou art, else had thine eyes already drowsed over these pages-a sadder sorrow still it is to summon up courage to revisit some darling den of your youthhead, and find it utterly demolished and for ever swept away from the very face of the earth. Why all this murderous and exterminating spirit of change? The ancient moss, with its heather head-high, and wide steep hags that the poled hunter could not overleap, is now drained, and limed, and ploughed, and clothed with the ragged nakedness of blighted barley. In a few years it will fall back into a desert, but never into the shaggy wilderness it once was, where the red and black cattle browsed the spots of herbage, and sheltered among the bent from the deluge of the thunderstorm. You look in vain for the beautiful moor on which you chased the whirring dragon-fly, or lay couched for hours to get a shot at the curlew, when, lo! and behold, a pack of grouse alighted within ten yards of your muzzle, and you let fly among them without injuring one feather of all the plumage. Or you will revisit the ROOKAN, loneliest of linns that ever sounded in the solitary silence of nature. In days of yore the loneliness was almost too profound for your beating heart; no living thing to be seen but the water-ouzel flitting along the rocks, or, as he rested a moment on a stone, turning towards you his white breast and then dropping into the water. Sometimes, indeed, when the spring evening was warm, a little before sunset, the grey lintie came, as if to freshen his plumage in the spray melting over the woods that covered the waterfall, and sang for his own delight a hasty carol, impatient of Heaven preserve us! what is it o'clock? Our watch is run down, and fast asleep, pointing in its dream to half-past one. What will mine host and hostess at the Crook be thinking of the old gentleman? They will be suspicious of an assignation and intrigue with some yellow-haired lassie of the Braes. Our character is at stake; but our innocence is known to Heaven, and "conscia sidera testor." One tumbler of hot toddy-and then to bed to make harmless love to the four shepherdesses sitting on the curtains on four dimity knolls-look which way we will by the rushlight; ogling us with bashful solicitations when sinking away into stoical repose. Mortifying thought to human vanity! we have never been missed; and on entering into the kitchen, we stand for several minutes unnoticed in the roar of laughter that shakes the muttonhams dangling from the porch-like chimney. The gudewife jaloused that we had gone to roost, and she had shut up the transe-doors, that we might not be disturbed by the merrymaking. Rustic wit, ignorant in its originality of Joe Miller, has, during all the hours of our river-side reverie, been dirling the rafters, and rough and ready at repartee, has never once waited for an encore. Strapping queans too are there, rising from the knees of lovers, and disengaging fond hands from soft bosoms, at our sudden apparition. Lassies, spare your blushes before the mild old man; for "Honi soit qui mal y pense," which, being interpreted, is "Evil to him who evil thinks." Rax down the fiddle from the peg, for we can handle her; and here goes a strathspey. There is no spring in the earthen floor, but there is one in every instep; and every reel has a kiss by way of introduction and postliminious preface. Better to overlook the fun, we mount a stool (not the cutty, for that is an old story, and even then our sex protected us), and our Neil-Gow-like bow-hand brings down our well-calculated elbow, at every stroke, within an inch of the red tappetoury on auld Saunders' broad blue bonnet. What daffin and skirling! Oh, that all England could see us in our glory! Are we indeed the dreaded Christopher North-he of a hundred plames! But while the dancers are all wiping their brows, or dandling their partners on their knees, even as the lion dandles the kid, we check our hand, and change our measure, till the plaintive "Cowdenknowes" or "The Bush aboon Traquair" hushes the room, so that you might hear the cat purring on the lightsome hearth, and the face of the most ordinary hizzie becomes absolutely beautiful in the emotion of nature true to the simple strain. The moon, no doubt, knows whether the morrow is to be dry or rainy, but the wisest man is not always able to fish it out of her hypocritical physiognomy. You trust to her hazy halo, and put your tackle in order for sunrise. There has not been so much as a drop of dewnot a breath of air stirs-those marbled wreaths cannot be called clouds-and the sun has already stared all the trouts in Peeblesshire into their stone cellars. You may as well angle in the dust of the high road from the inn door to the manse, as in the Tweed. On the other hand, you bite your nails to see Luna, about two o'clock in the morning, unveiled, and vivid at a route given by her to the stars; and rain, you think, may possibly fall before breakfast in the deserts of Arabia, but certainly not in Scotland. What, then, makes you bounce from bed, as if your bolster were of whins, at the first cockcrow? The pat-pat-pattering of rain on your window facing the south! Beautiful misty clouds, all in a state of pregnancy! Earth glitters to the new-risen rays, and after meridian there will not be an hour till sunset without its rainbow. Breakfast! You would no more wait for breakfast than a post-letter informing you of the issue of a Chancery suit. You carelessly drop a quartern loaf into your pouch, along with the cheese whang and the leathern bottle, and off like a hart to the running brooks! dred rivulets. You decide upon one that seems somewhat stronger than the rest, and it disappears in the dry desert. You try another glittering thread, and it leads you into a melancholy marsh-a third leaves you on the pleasant herbage, but you have no divining-rod to quiver when it lies above the hidden spring. So you must be satisfied with the emotion in its wide open flow, nor hope ever to reach the Nile-head. Or suppose you trace three separate rills, each to its fountain-well. Which yields the prevailing water, and through all its future course gives the peculiar tinge of feeling or thought? Alas, mighty metaphysician! little better art thou than the blind leading the blind. But here we are at the source of the Tweednor far from those of the Annan and the Clyde. What three beautiful flights might our fancy take, following the three rivers to their firths and seas! What would hinder her from breakfasting with the benevolent Owen, and studying the new philosophy in his cotton-mills? Why might she not write a criticism on the pictures in Hamilton Palace, and embody in it a history of the art from Apelles to Haydon? "Oh ! Bothwell Bank, thou bloomest fair!" and Mary Queen! what woes were thine from the day thy virgin zone was untied by the youthful Francis, till thy lovely neck was bared to the headsman's axe! Then, what punch-bowls in Glasgowwhat "herrings at the Broomielaw!" And hath to Dumbarton Castle the sword of Wallace been restored? Whirr flies the gorcock from the heather at our ear, and we see again the gambols of the infant Tweed. A ruined castle is a grand and a melancholy sight-but that last epithet applies as well to a ruined cottage. That is one-that mere heap of stones that you might mistake for a cairn. Less than twenty years ago it was a laughing summer abode. For several winters it was untenanted, and only the roof fell in beneath the weight of snow-the walls stood fast, and there the hill Oh, we feel that we were deceiving ourselves when we said that our old age was not subject to the anglimania. We would not give up the prospect of this day's sport to be the Right Honourable Frederick Robinson, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Nothing drumly about the sweet Tweed this morning-no pool the colour of porter with barmy foam-but the deeps a black blue, and the shallows a dark green, covered with foam-bells that break beneath the breezes warm-breathing from the south-south-cattle sheltered. Then part of the one gable west, the angler's darling airt. Yes "O' a' the airts the wind can blaw, He dearly lo'es the west!" Yet what philosophy even in our passion! Who would so run counter to that system which places virtue in propriety as to fish up a stream? So let us take our unangling way up the Tweed to its very source below the Erickstane, speculating on each pool and eddy, and prophesying the multitudinous murder of our downward course. Pray, acutest of metaphysicians, did you ever trace up any one single thing in your own mind to its origin? When the emotion flows broadly along, you know its nature and its name, its depths and shallows, nor doubt to recognise it when it glides away behind a knoll, or into a wood. But follow it into the misty uplands of the spirit, and you are bewildered among a hun was pulled down to build a fold. Lightning struck the other into a heap, and the front and back walls soon followed in natural decay. Wild-flowers were soon sown by the winds in the dust of the mouldering stones-mosses crept up from the earth and bound together the rubbish-grass-seeds had been on the floors of the inhabited house, clean swept as they used to be, and they soon sprouted through the chinks-and how they came there it is not so easy to tell, but sure enough there they are, two or three pretty little limber birch-trees rustling on the ruin. Last time we were here, there was a porch not unadorned with roses-they are dead-a thatchroof, trim as trim might be, on which the doves and pigeons were making love-and the cheerful smell of the peat-reek wreathing along the side of the sheltering brae. Now you are expecting a tale of tears, a specimen of Scotch damask, from the loom of Lichen, Moss, & Sons-an old copartnery that have stood many a storm, and that will not fail, even although there should be a glut of their manufactures in the market. Thank you kindly, my pretty little dear of a mountain fairy-you have placed my chair quite to my usual habits. There, Lady Green-scarf, take the leathern guard of my pocket-pistol, and get it filled by your beneath yonder knoll-and see that she gives you moving story." But no such story have we to tell now, for none such appertains to what once was a human dwelling. The honest shepherd who lived here, had a dear farm of it, and found it no easy matter to make both ends of the year meet, without an ugly gap of poverty. He was the cleverest fellow in all the county, and had "Hogg on Sheep" at his finger-ends. His wife, too, was as active a woman as ever twirled a churnstaff. At quoits, "putting the stane," wrest-playmate the Naiad, who lives in the fountain ling, and hop-step-and-jump, with or without the staff, you must have gone to Cumberland for Tom Nicholson or Will Litt to match the worst of his two sons-and his only daughter, in her Sabbath array, was fair as the stately harebell. Well then-an extensive farmer near Kelso made Rob Riddell his head hind, while his wife, who, for a considerable number of seasons, had prudently given up child-bearing, undertook the dairy. And will you believe what I tell you on their own authority, they left Erickstane-brae without a sigh! On the day of the flitting, instead of weeping farewell to the stocks, and stones, and trees, and the somewhat coarsefleeced sheep, Rob the Ranter got so drunk with whisky-or if you would rather word it so, so moistened with mountain dew-that it took six men to hoist him into the cart, and half of that number, assisted by his faithful and affectionate Leezie, to keep him down when he was in, so obstreperously did he enact his vagaries among the straw. Unlike the poor girl in Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," the harebell did not "leave a lover's for a father's arms," a cold exchange, | and palpable injustice. But she took her lover along with her, Allan Armstrong, ploughman to Mr Weir of Annandale-head, against whose character (forgetting that scrape Tibbie o' the Crosslees brought him into when he was a mere callant) no man had ever breathed a whisper; and, if he had, Allan would not have been slow of making him find his own level. The two sons, Jock and Jamie, for they had been christened with those very popular names, saw the flitting as far as Noblehouse, where, after taking an affectionate farewell of the authors of their existence, and a sister, whom, in spite of perpetual bickerings, they loved most tenderly, they remained two whole days and nights without seeming to remember that sleep was one of the great laws of our nature; and on recovering from about twenty half-mutchkins each, finished the forty-eight hours' relaxation from all pastoral and agricultural labours, by two successive single combats, in a ree state, Jock with a gipsy, and Jamie with a horse-couper, both of whom, in spite of science and shifting, fell beneath the Tweeddale twins; one with three fractured ribs and a broken leg, and the other with one bashed nose and two puffed ears, that made him one of the most grotesque of mortals. What Who the are you two?-And from what scarecrows, may I ask, have you raised the loan of that wild and withered attire?—Are you a witch and a warlock ?-And if so, pray, are you married ?—And if so, have you progeny? And are the imps flunkeys down below in a place that shall be nameless?-I beg your pardon, honest people-sit down there-lie down thereand let us break bread and taste salt together, with a previous grace; and then old Christopher North is safe, were you Sin and Satan. Only two poor beggar bodies, in duds and with wallets, trudging their ways homewards to some hovel or another, on a bit neuk by the road-side! Man and wife they indeed are-that is easy enough to see-and it is no less so to see So much for blarney-now for breakfast. Ho! that they are both of them hungry and thirsty ho! the table is covered with a most beautiful | exceedingly, and faint therewithal, espesially the woman, who has a couple of brats tucked up, with their dirty sleeping faces-dirty, but not disgusting-hanging out cheek-by-jowl, in a bag-like fold of her gown, between her shoulders. The wearied creatures sit down thankfully on the turf beside me, and say little or nothing fatigue not being loquacious. They take the bread and cheese, with a word and a look to me, and more than a word and a look to heaven; and forthwith, after two or three moderate mouthfuls, begin eating away like fighting-cocks rather than Christians. Never saw I ancient couple chew cheese with more effective jaws. The half of the quartern (ourselves will account for the other), like an old song, is handed down by oral tradition. Catch any miserable diseased beggar, male or female, refusing a caulker. We shall not, however, make them both drunk, although a little thing would do it after their twenty-mile tramp since they rose from the straw. Just enough, and no more, to cheer their hearts and comfort their bones. But one of the brats has awoke, and by pulling the nose of the other, has brought it into a similar predicament; so, sorry as we are to break up the party, we must make ourselves scarce, and set ourselves out for serious fishing. In spite of the laws against vagrant mendicity, the benefaction of a few halfpence unwarranted won't do much harm to the state. But let me remember-they asked for nothing-therefore, open your fist, Watty Wallets, for a crown-piece; but promise not to buy a gill till you get to your own clachan. Now, let us fill the maw of the craving pannier. The large golden trouts love the unsullied streams near the parent spring. A gross mistake to think they inhabit only the palace of the waterfall. There, we have hooked the Hermit of Erickstane! No sharp-edged rock to cut the gossamere-no twisted roots to entangle-no fallen log-tree under which the solitary may plunge in despair-no wool-gathering briars on the brink to impede the landing-no ledge for him to rush madly over, like a harpooned whale, carrying away the end-line, and leaving the cheated rod in our helpless hand! But low green banks without a shrub, or a rush, or a bracken, edged with the fine pounce-like silver sand! widely-but motionless, except in the mouth and gills, while another half-pounder dangles unheeded at the tail-fly, dwindled into a minnow beside the Triton. Look at the blush-rose, as in full-blown pride she salutes the morning-but know, while you are gazing, that before the meridian sunshine, her glory will be somewhat dim-at evening, a faded and unrejoicing thing-a ball without balm and without beauty, that you would not care to scatter into tarnished leaves beneath your feet. Look at the rainbow affronting Phoebus, having borrowed from the god that many-coloured rim, which even cold-hearted science, while it scrutinises, adores-turn away your eyes but for a moment, and it has left the sky. So in halfan-hour would it be with that glorious fish, now bespangled with stars. What hero ever wore such grand crosses as these? What ribboned orders so effulgent? But let him lie on the sand there, and in the sunshine, just while we fish half-a-dozen pools, and he will barken into bedimmed and shrivelled scaliness, worthy but the admiration of the cook-maid, when about to gut him on the kitchen dresser! So without compunction, in with him (if he will go) into the pannier, head and tail relentlessly curved together,-for such and so unlovely is death. Man is by nature a beast of prey. So said old Hobbes-and what angler can deny it? Isaac Walton himself was a murderer. If the ghosts of all the pikes he had ever trolled had taken upon them to send constant deputations "to draw his curtains at the dead of night," not one of them all had ever been called upon a second time upon that service. By the way, a pike would make a horrid ghost. What cadaverous jaw and jowl! What a bony spectre, where not one single bone of all those thinner than a hair, up to the horse-like spine, was deficient in the threatening skeleton! To frighten you more deadly, perhaps an artificial mouse in his mouth, with agglomerated hooks, and the twisted brasschain that in his tortured hour he strove in vain to snap asunder. What think you of a yardlong eel, not only haunting your bed, but evolving his lean length from below your bolster, and worm-like crawling down your back, cold as ice, and hard as iron, jagged too as the wheel of a Who would have thought that a fish watch, and emitting a faint hiss like that of a who had passed a long life of meditation in a serpent. The very spinning minnows would pastoral district, would have thus unwieldily thus have their revenge, for they would come in struggled against destiny! The inextricable shoals among your sheets, and bury you alive midge-fly is in his tongue-and the invisible under bushels of small anatomies. And then, filament of fate draws him from his native ele-oh! the bait you so purged in moss-bags, and ment to a dry death. It was so set down in the Doomsday-book of the Naiad long before he was spawned. He belonged to Christopher North in the roe of his first ancestor, and the predestined hour is come. Voluntarily at last has he sailed towards the land, his back-fins above the shallowing water, indicative of his magnitude, and lies not dead, for he gasps impaled through all their writhing knots from head to tail (never, never were we guilty of such enormity), with all the careless cruelty of a practised executioner! But they have no need to become ghosts before they can enjoy their retaliation; for whatever geologists aver to the contrary, down they glide with ease through the pory earth, or mine their way without much |