the Ancient British, Melross, the projection of the meadow. Moel in Welsh and Maol in Irish signify something bald, naked, bare. Thus MoalRoss, in the language of the Irish monks who first built the church here, would signify the naked promontory. Moel in Welsh is now usually applied to a smooth mountain, as Moel-Siabod; and we find Ross continually showing its Celtic origin where there is a promontory, as Ross on the Moray-frith, and Ross in Herefordshire from a winding of the Wye. But some old sculptor, on a stone still preserved in the village, has made a punning derivation for it, by carving a mell, or mallet, and a rose over it. This stone was part of a wall of the old prison, long since pulled down.

The site of Melrose, like all monastic ones, is fine. The abbey stands on a broad level near the Tweed, but is surrounded by hills and fields full of beauty, and peopled with a thousand beings of romance, tradition, and poetry. South of the village rise the three peaks of the Eildon hill, bearing aloft the fame of Michael Scott and Thomas the Rhymer. On the banks of the Tweed, opposite to Melrose, lies Gattonside, buried in its gardens and orchards, and still retaining its faith in many a story of the supernatural; and about three miles westward, on the same bank of the river, stands Abbotsford, raised by a magician more mighty than Michael Scott. How is it possible to approach that haunted abode without meeting on the way the most wonderful troop of wild, and lofty, and beautiful beings that ever peopled earth or the realm of imagination? Scotch, English, Gallic, Indian, Syrian come forth to meet you. The Bruce, the Scottish Jameses, Coeur de

Lion, Elizabeth, Leicester, Mary of Scots, James I. of England, Montrose, Claverhouse, Cumberland the Butcher. The Covenanters are ready to preach and fight anew, the Highland clans rise in aid of the Stuart. What women of dazzling beauty-Flora M'Ivor, Rose Bradwardine, Rebecca the noble Jewess, Lucy Ashton, and Amy Robsart, the lovely Effie Deans, and her homely yet glorious sister Jenny, the bewitching Di Vernon, and Minna and Brenda Troil, of the northern isles, stand radiant amid a host of lesser beauties.

Then comes Rob Roy, the Robin Hood of the hills; then Balfour of Burley issues, a stalwart apparition, from his hiding-place, and of infinite humor and strangeness of aspect. Where is there a band like this-the Baron of Bradwardine, Dominie Sampson, Meg Merrilies, Monkbarns, Edie Ochiltree, Old Mortality, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Andrew Fairservice, Caleb Balderston, Flibbertigibbet, Mona of the Fitful head, and that fine fellow the farmer of Liddesdale, with all his Peppers and Mustards raffling at his heels? But not even out of Melrose need you move a step to find the name of a faithful servant of Sir Walter. Tom Purdie lies in Melrose Abbey-Yard; and Scott himself had engraven on his tomb that he was "the Wood-forester of Abbotsford," probably the title which Tom gave himself. Those who visit Melrose will take a peep at the gravestone of Tom Purdie, who sleeps amid a long line of the dead, reaching from the days of Aidan to our own, as alive he filled a little niche in the regard of a master who has given to both high and low so many niches in the temple of immortality.

CARLYLE'S BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY HOMES*

BY JOHN BURROUGHS.

There was no road in Scotland or England which I should have been so glad to have walked over as that from Edinburgh to Ecclefechan, a distance covered many times by the feet of him whose birth and burial place I was about to visit. Carlyle as a young man had walked it with Edward Irving (the Scotch say "travel" when they mean going afoot), and he had walked it alone, and as a lad with an elder boy, on his way to Edinburgh College. He says in his "Reminiscences" he nowhere else had such affectionate, sad, thoughtful, and in fact interesting and salutary journeys.

Not to be entirely cheated out of my walk, I left the train at Lockerby, a small Scotch markettown, and accomplished the remainder of the journey to Ecclefechan on foot, a brief six-mile pull. It was the first day of June; the afternoon sun was shining brightly. It was still the honeymoon of travel with me, not yet two weeks in the bonnie land; the road was smooth and clean as the floor of a sea beach, and firmer, and my feet devoured the distance with right good will. . . .

Four miles from Lockerby I came to Mainhill, the name of a farm where the Carlyle family lived many years, and where Carlyle first read Goethe, "in a dry ditch," Froude says, and translated

*From "Fresh Fields." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1884.

"Wilhelm Meister." The land drops gently away to the south and east, opening up broad views in these directions, but it does not seem to be the bleak and windy place Froude describes it. The crops looked good, and the fields smooth and fertile. The soil is rather a stubborn clay, nearly the same as one sees everywhere. . . .

The Carlyles were living on this farm while their son was teaching school at Annan, and later at Kircaldy with Irving, and they supplied him with cheese, butter, ham, oatmeal, etc., from their scanty stores. A new farm-house has been built since then, tho the old one is still standing; doubtless the same Carlyle's father refers to in a letter to his son, in 1817, as being under way. The parish minister was expected at Mainhill. "Your mother was very anxious to have the house done before he came, or else she said she would run over the hill and hide herself."

From Mainhill the highway descends slowly to the village of Ecclefechan, the site of which is marked to the eye, a mile or more away, by the spire of the church rising up against a background of Scotch firs, which clothe a hill beyond. I soon enter the main street of the village, which in Carlyle's youth had an open burn or creek flowing through the center of it. This has been covered over by some enterprising citizen, and instead of a loitering little burn, crossed by numerous bridges, the eye is now greeted by a broad expanse of small cobble-stones. The cottages are for the most part very humble, and rise from the outer edges of the pavement, as if the latter had been turned up and shaped to make their walls. The church is a handsome brown-stone structure,

of recent date, and is more in keeping with the fine fertile country about than with the little village in its front. In the cemetery back of it, Carlyle lies buried. As I approached, a girl sat by the road-side, near the gate, combing her black locks and arranging her toilet; waiting, as it proved, for her mother and brother, who lingered in the village. A couple of boys were cutting nettles against the hedge; for the pigs, they said, after the sting had been taken out of them by boiling. Across the street from the cemetery the cows of the villagers were grazing.

I must have thought it would be as easy to distinguish Carlyle's grave from the others as it was to distinguish the man while living, or his fame when dead; for it never occurred to me to ask in what part of the inclosure it was placed. Hence, when I found myself inside the gate, which opens from the Annan road through a high stone wall, I followed the most worn path toward a new and imposing-looking monument on the far side of the cemetery; and the edge of my fine emotion was a good deal dulled against the marble when I found it bore a strange name. I tried others, and still others, but was disappointed. I found a long row of Carlyles, but he whom I sought was not among them. My pilgrim enthusiasm felt itself needlessly hindered and chilled. How many rebuffs could one stand? Carlyle dead, then, was the same as Carlyle living; sure to take you down a peg or two when you came to lay your homage at his feet.

Presently I saw "Thomas Carlyle" on a big marble slab that stood in a family inclosure. But this turned out to be the name of a nephew of the