ains.
It is also much grander, and the situation at present much more
beautiful, that ruin not having suffered like Melrose Abbey from the
encroachments of a town. The architecture at Melrose is, I believe,
superior in the exactness and taste of some of the minute ornamental
parts; indeed, it is impossible to conceive anything more delicate than
the workmanship, especially in the imitations of flowers.

We descended to Dryburgh after having gone a considerable way upon high
ground. A heavy rain when we reached the village, and there was no
public-house. A well-dressed, well-spoken woman courteously--shall I say
charitably?--invited us into her cottage, and permitted us to make
breakfast; she showed us into a neat parlour, furnished with prints, a
mahogany table, and other things which I was surprised to see, for her
husband was only a day-labourer, but she had been Lady Buchan's
waiting-maid, which accounted for these luxuries and for a noticeable
urbanity in her manners. All the cottages in this neighbourhood, if I am
not mistaken, were covered with red tiles, and had chimneys. After
breakfast we set out in the rain to the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, which
are near Lord Buchan's house, and, like Bothwell Castle, appropriated to
the pleasure of the owner. We rang a bell at the gate, and, instead of a
porter, an old woman came to open it through a narrow side-alley cut in a
thick plantation of evergreens. On entering, saw the thatch of her hut
just above the trees, and it looked very pretty, but the poor creature
herself was a figure to frighten a child,--bowed almost double, having a
hooked nose and overhanging eyebrows, a complexion stained brown with
smoke, and a cap that might have been worn for months and never washed.
No doubt she had been cowering over her peat fire, for if she had emitted
smoke by her breath and through every pore, the odour could not have been
stronger. This ancient woman, by right of office, attended us to show
off the curiosities, and she had her tale as perfect, though it was not
quite so long a one, as the gentleman Swiss, whom I remember to have seen
at Blenheim with his slender wand and dainty white clothes. The house of
Lord Buchan and the Abbey stand upon a large flat peninsula, a green holm
almost covered with fruit-trees. The ruins of Dryburgh are much less
extensive than those of Melrose, and greatly inferior both in the
architecture and stone, which is much mouldered away. Lor