I confess to a strong feeling of reality, when my guide took me to a grave where a flat, green, mossy stone, broken across the middle, is reputed to be the grave of Michael Scott.  I felt, for the moment, verily persuaded that if the guide would pry up one of the stones we should see him there, as described:—­

  “His hoary beard in silver rolled,
  He seemed some seventy winters old;
  A palmer’s amice wrapped, him round,
  With a wrought Spanish baldric bound,
  Like a pilgrim from beyond the sea: 
  His left hand held his book of might;
  A silver cross was in his right;
    The lamp was placed beside his knee: 
  High and majestic was his look,
  At which, the fellest fiends had shook,
  And all unruffled, was his face: 
  They trusted his soul had gotten grace.”

I never knew before how fervent a believer I had been in the realities of these things.

There are two graves that I saw, which correspond to those mentioned in these lines:—­

  “And there the dying lamps did burn
    Before thy lone and lowly urn,
  O gallafit chief of Otterburne,
    And thine, dark knight of Liddesdale.”

The Knight of Otterburne was one of the Earls Douglas, killed in a battle with Henry Percy, called Hotspur, in 1388.  The Knight of Liddesdale was another Douglas, who lived in the reign of David II., and was called the “Flower of Chivalry.”  One performance of this “Flower” is rather characteristic of the times.  It seems the king made one Ramsey high sheriff of Teviotdale.  The Earl of Douglas chose to consider this as a personal affront, as he wanted the office himself.  So, by way of exhibiting his own qualifications for administering justice, he one day came down on Ramsey, vi et armis, took him off his judgment seat, carried him to one of his castles, and without more words tumbled him and his horse into a deep dungeon, where they both starved to death.  There’s a “Flower” for you, peculiar to the good old times.  Nobody could have doubted after this his qualifications to be high sheriff.

Having looked all over the abbey from, below, I noticed a ruinous winding staircase; so up I went, rustling along through the ivy, which matted and wove itself around the stones.  Soon I found myself looking down on the abbey from a new point of view—­from a little narrow stone gallery, which threads the whole inside of the building.  There I paced up and down, looking occasionally through the ivy-wreathed arches on the green, turfy floor below.

It seems as if silence and stillness had become a real presence in these old places.  The voice of the guide and the company beneath had a hushed and muffled sound; and when I rustled the ivy leaves, or, in trying to break off a branch, loosened some fragment of stone, the sound affected me with a startling distinctness.  I could not but inly muse and wonder on the life these old monks and abbots led, shrined up here as they were in this lovely retirement.