And so we pass to many-towered and turreted and pinnacled Abbotsford, and to large-windowed Melrose, and to peaceful Dryburgh, where, under a plain bevelled slab, lies the great Romancer whom Scotland holds only second in her affections to her great poet.  Here in the foreground of the Melrose Abbey view (436) is a gravestone which looks as if it might be deciphered with a lens.  Let us draw out this inscription from the black archives of oblivion.  Here it is: 

In Memory of Francis Cornel, late Labourer in Greenwell, Who died 11th July, 1827, aged 89 years.  Also Margaret Betty, his Spouse, who died 2’d Dec’r, 1831, aged 89 years.

This is one charm, as we have said over and over, of the truth-telling photograph.  We who write in great magazines of course float off from the wreck of our century, on our life-preserving articles, to immortality.  What a delight it is to snatch at the unknown head that shows for an instant through the wave, and drag it out to personal recognition and a share in our own sempiternal buoyancy!  Go and be photographed on the edge of Niagara, O unknown aspirant for human remembrance!  Do not throw yourself, O traveller, into Etna, like Empedocles, but be taken by the camera standing on the edge of the crater!  Who is that lady in the carriage at the door of Burns’s cottage?  Who is that gentleman in the shiny hat on the sidewalk in front of the Shakspeare house?  Who are those two fair youths lying dead on a heap of dead at the trench’s side in the cemetery of Melegnano, in that ghastly glass stereograph in our friend Dr. Bigelow’s collection?  Some Austrian mother has perhaps seen her boy’s features in one of those still faces.  All these seemingly accidental figures are not like the shapes put in by artists to fill the blanks in their landscapes, but real breathing persons, or forms that have but lately been breathing, not found there by chance, but brought there with a purpose, fulfilling some real human errand, or at least, as in the last-mentioned picture, waiting to be buried.

Before quitting the British Islands, it would be pleasant to wander through the beautiful Vale of Avoca in Ireland, and to look on those many exquisite landscapes and old ruins and crosses which have been so admirably rendered in the stereograph.  There is the Giant’s Causeway, too,—­not in our own collection, but which our friend Mr. Waterston has transplanted with all its basaltic columns to his Museum of Art in Chester Square.  Those we cannot stop to look at now, nor these many objects of historical or poetical interest which lie before us on our own table.  Such are the pictures of Croyland Abbey, where they kept that jolly drinking-horn of “Witlaf, King of the Saxons”, which Longfellow has made famous; Bedd-Gelert, the grave of the faithful hound immortalized by—­nay, who has immortalized—­William Spencer; the stone that marks the spot where William Rufus fell by Tyrrel’s shaft; the Lion’s Head in Dove Dale, fit to be compared with our own Old Man of the Mountain; the “Bowder Stone,” or the great boulder of Borrowdale; and many others over which we love to dream at idle moments.