Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 108, Vol. III, January 23, 1886

Synopsis

I am once more at the water’s edge. It is the Tweed, silver-voiced, musical, its ripples breaking into liquid crystals as the rushing stream leaps into the breast of the softly-circling pool. Here, in its upper reaches, amid the pastoral hills of Peeblesshire, its volume of fair water is untainted by pollution. It has miles and miles yet to run ere it comes up with the floating scum and dismal discoloration of ‘mill-races’ and the refuse of the dye-house.

And, there!—is not that Drummelzier Castle on the opposite bank above, its gray walls powdered with the yellows and browns of spreading lichens, and its shattered bastions waving here and there a crest of summer’s greenest grass? The fierce old chieftains who wrangled Border-fashion in its halls are silent to-day; the wild Tweedies and Hays and Veitches have had their rough voices smothered in the churchyard dust.

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