o see it. "I have been
bringing you," he said, "where there is little enough to be seen, only
that Scotch cottage, but though not worth looking at, I could not pass
it. It was our first country house when newly married, and many a
contrivance it had to make it comfortable. I made a dining-table for
it with my own hands. Look at these two miserable willow-trees on
either side the gate into the enclosure; they are tied together at the
top to be an arch, and a cross made of two sticks over them is not yet
decayed. To be sure it is not much of a lion to show a stranger; but I
wanted to see it again myself, for I assure you that after I had
constructed it, _mamma_ (Mrs. Scott) and I both of us thought it so
fine, we turned out to see it by moonlight, and walked backwards from
it to the cottage-door, in admiration of our own magnificence and its
picturesque effect." It was here at Lasswade that he bought the
phaeton, which was the first wheeled carriage that ever penetrated to
Liddesdale, a feat which it accomplished in the first August of this
century.

When Scott left the cottage at Lasswade in 1804, it was to take up his
country residence in Selkirkshire, of which he had now been made
sheriff, in a beautiful little house belonging to his cousin,
Major-General Sir James Russell, and known to all the readers of
Scott's poetry as the Ashestiel of the _Marmion_ introductions. The
Glenkinnon brook dashes in a deep ravine through the grounds to join
the Tweed; behind the house rise the hills which divide the Tweed from
the Yarrow; and an easy ride took Scott into the scenery of the
Yarrow. The description of Ashestiel, and the brook which runs through
it, in the introduction to the first canto of _Marmion_ is indeed one
of the finest specimens of Scott's descriptive poetry:--

"November's sky is chill and drear,
November's leaf is red and sear;
Late, gazing down the steepy linn,
That hems our little garden in,
Low in its dark and narrow glen,
You scarce the rivulet might ken,
So thick the tangled greenwood grew,
So feeble trill'd the streamlet through;
Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen,
Through bush and briar no longer green,
An angry brook, it sweeps the glade,
Brawls over rock and wild cascade,
And, foaming brown with doubled speed,
Hurries its waters to the Tweed."

Selkirk was his nearest town, and that was seven miles from Ashestiel;
and even his neares