FRAMED AND GLAZED. 403 berry garden below. The house is fitted up with modern comforts, and must be a very pleasant summer residence, with the winding Esk brawling beneath, and the opposing woods rising so closely and so high—a shut-in landscape, but one that is rich in beauty. The greatest drawback must be the swarms of summer tourists; a greater plague than even the swarms of summer insects. From Roslin Castle's echoing walls says the old ballad; and, up to the present day, the resounding calls are sustained by Jones shouting to Brown that he has found a capital place in which to have their pale ale and a smoke; or by Macpherson roaring to Mactavish concerning some fearful feud over smuggled strawberries. 6 On the first day on which I made my acquaintance with Roslin Castle, and passed the windows of this southern house, the framed and glazed portrait of a young lady at work on a piece of embroidery, making holes and mending them,' was a sufficient warning that the family was in residence,' and that tourists could not be admitted. While I was mentally bewailing this state of affairs, a guide suddenly appeared from nowhere in particular (according to the custom of the tribeeven as the vulture from the viewless distance will advance upon its prey) and sought to console me by the uncomplimentary remark (in which the aforesaid young lady was wholly annihilated) that there was nothing worth seeing in there; but that if I would follow him 'down there,' I should see something worth looking at. Like the ancient mariner with the wedding guest, he led me with his glittering eye'-the glitter being evidently the result of copious whisky-and I followed him down there.' The Avernus proved to be the triple tier of vaults partly built and partly hewn in the rock, and the oldest portion of Roslin Castle. They are mere dungeons of red sandstone, some of them, indeed, being pointed out by the guide as such, and no doubt correctly; but the majority have been used as bed-rooms; and, unless the beds were thick with heather, the baron's retainers who occupied them must have been anything but blythe and gay; and, although a medieval Blair may have provided them with his rheumatic pills, the remedy could scarcely have preserved them from that Blair's grave into which the dungeon damps' must have hastened them. There was one undoubted dungeon-the Little-ease-a pit into which the hapless prisoner was lowered with cords, and to which not a ray of light could struggle. But all these dungeon-like rooms were but scantily provided in the matter of sunshine; the windows being mere arrow-slits that admitted the narrowest wedge of light. The largest room appeared to have been used as a kitchen; the chimney went up the rock to a great height, and looking up it at the bit of blue sky above was like gazing up the shaft of a coal-pit. A door leads out of the dungeon-like room into the strawberry-noted garden, above which the castle appears to tower with as many stories as a Manchester mill. We pass through this pretty garden, the Esk brawling beneath us, and tree-covered precipices rising from the other bank, and we climb up to the postern-gate of the castle, shaded by a venerable yew. From here, as we cannot swim the Esk river, where ford there VIEW FROM THE OPPOSITE BANK. 405 is none,' like young Lochinvar, we make our way to a foot-bridge thrown across the stream hard by the bleaching-fields, where the green grass bears linen for daisies, and where the mill-wheels are churning up the waters of poetical Esk until he froths with wrath at being put to so prosaic a task. Then we turn to the left, and taking an artistic liberty to trespass, scramble up to a certain height from whence we conceive there must be a highly effective view of the castle and chapel. Nor are we deceived; beneath us and before us is a magnificent subject for a sketch, if only we have the ability to place it upon the drawing-block. The castle looks so near to us, that we seem as though we could look down its chimneys; and an enemy posted upon these heights would have had little difficulty in winging a cloth-yard shaft through any defender who had the temerity to appear upon the battlements. In fact, the fortalice is overlooked on all sides, and must have been particularly open to attack from these wooded heights. Behind the castle ruins rises the College Hill, with its wondrous chapel, from whence the ground slopes sharply down to the right studded with fine clumps of timber. Below us, and stretching away to the right to Hawthornden, is a wealth of greenery; it clothes the precipitous banks of the Esk, and entirely hides it from our view, save one scrap of brawling river in a direct line between us and the castle. While I paint on at this view, and (being in a dazed state with the glare of the sun and the bright colours) am tempted to perform that wondrous acrobatic feat of mental calisthenics which is called throwing oneself into the Past; as I gaze on this shattered home of the St. Clairs, the rattle of a railway train and the scream of the engine-whistle drag me back to the realities of the Present, and remind me that the Peebles railway is close at hand, and that tourists can see the sights of Roslin for one shilling. P CHAPTER XL. ROSLIN GLEN. Scenery of the Glen-The Course of the Esk-The River's 6 ASSING under the Castle Mound, and amid a débris of blocks of sandstone, we find ourselves beneath the lofty arch of the bridge by which the fortress was approached from the east. This ravine is natural, and served to insulate the castled rock.' It leads us down to the river's bank between two walls; a door to the right gives admittance to the strawberrygarden; a turnstile to the left will let us pass into an open meadow, and into that 'sweet glen' where once came Harold, bard of brave St. Clair'— With war and wonder all on flame, To Roslin's bowers young Harold came, Where, by sweet glen and greenwood tree, He learn'd a milder minstrelsy. What a beautiful path it is! Here is the river Esk about twenty feet below us, carolling along amid fragmentary boulders, with overhanging rock-walls on either hand. It is but a very narrow stream; but its sinuous march is attended with far more picturesque details |