n and the modern tripper.
The Waverley Route of the North British Railway passes down the valley
within a few miles of its best-known landmarks. The Road Committees are
careful as to their duty, and a well-developed series of coaching tours
has proved exceedingly popular. From a miserable expanse of bleak moors
and quaking moss-hags, the greater portion of lower Liddesdale, at
least, has passed into a picturesque combination of moor and woodland
with rich pastoral holms and fields in the highest state of cultivation.

But the main glory of Liddesdale is the romance that hangs over it.
There is probably no parish in Scotland--for be it remembered that
Liddesdale is virtually one parish--which could show such an
extraordinary number of peel-houses to its credit. Their ruins, or where
these have disappeared, the sites are pointed out with surprising
frequency. A distinctively Border district, this was to be expected, and
the like is true of the English side also. A Liddesdale Keep, still in
excellent preservation--"four-square to all the winds that blow"--and
far and away the strongest and the most massive pile on the Border
frontier is Hermitage, in the pretty vale of that name, within easy
reach from Steele Road or Riccarton stations, three and four miles
respectively. Built by the Comyns in the thirteenth century, it passed
to the Soulises, the Angus Douglases, to "Bell-the-Cat" himself, the
Hepburn Bothwells, and the "bold Buccleuch," whose successor still holds
it. Legend may almost be said to be indigenous to the soil of Hermitage,
and one wonders not that Scott found his happy hunting-ground here. The
youngest child will tell us about that "Ogre" Soulis, who was so hated
by his vassals for his awful oppression of them, that at last they
boiled him alive--horrible vengeance--on the Nine-Stane Rig, a Druidic
circle near by. In part confirmation of the tragedy it is asserted that
the actual cauldron may still be seen at Dalkeith Palace. Scott was
constantly quoting the verses from Leyden's ballad:

"On a circle of stones they placed the pot,
On a circle of stones but barely nine;
They heated it red and fiery hot
Till the burnish'd brass did glimmer and shine

They rolled him up in a sheet of lead,
A sheet of lead for a funeral pall;
They plunged him in the cauldron red,
And melted him, lead, and bones, and all."

The Nine-Stane Rig is the scene also of the fragmentary "Barthram's
D