I went up into a little room where an elderly woman professed to have quite a collection of the Melrose relics.  Some years ago extensive restorations and repairs were made in the old abbey, in which Walter Scott took a deep interest.  At that time, when the scaffolding was up for repairing the building, as I understood, Scott had the plaster casts made of different parts, which he afterwards incorporated into his own dwelling at Abbotsford.  I said to the good woman that I had understood by Washington Irving’s account, that Scott appropriated bona fide fragments of the building, and alluded to the account which he gives of the little red sandstone lion from Melrose.  She repelled the idea with great energy, and said she had often heard Sir Walter say, that he would not carry off a bit of the building as big as his thumb.  She showed me several plaster casts that she had in her possession, which were taken at this time.  There were several corbels there; one was the head of an old monk, and looked as if it might have been a mask taken of his face the moment after death; the eyes were hollow and sunken, the cheeks fallen in, the mouth lying helplessly open, showing one or two melancholy old stumps of teeth.  I wondered over this, whether it really was the fac-simile of some poor old Father Ambrose, or Father Francis, whose disconsolate look, after his death agony, had so struck the gloomy fancy of the artist as to lead him to immortalize him in a corbel, for a lasting admonition to his fat worldly brethren; for if we may trust the old song, these monks of Melrose had rather a suspicious reputation in the matter of worldly conformity.  The impudent ballad says,—­

  “O, the monks of Melrose, they made good, kail
    On Fridays, when they fasted;
  They never wanted beef or ale
    As long as their neighbors’ lasted.”

Naughty, roistering fellows!  I thought I could perceive how this poor Father Francis had worn his life out exhorting them to repentance, and given up the ghost at last in despair, and so been made at once into a saint and a corbel.

There were fragments of tracery, of mouldings and cornices, and grotesque bits of architecture there, which I would have given a good deal to be the possessor of.  Stepping into a little cottage hard by to speak to the guide about unlocking the gates, when we went out on our moonlight excursion at midnight, I caught a glimpse, in an inner apartment, of a splendid, large, black dog.  I gave one exclamation and jump, and was into the room after him.

“Ah,” said the old man, “that was just like Sir Walter; he always had an eye for a dog.”

It gave me a kind of pain to think of him and his dogs, all lying in the dust together; and yet it was pleasant to hear this little remark of him, as if it were made by those who had often seen, and were fond of thinking of him.  The dog’s name was Coal, and he was black enough, and remarkable enough, to make a figure in a story—­a genuine Melrose Abbey dog.  I should not wonder if he were a descendant, in a remote degree, of the “mauthe doog,” that supernatural beast, which Scott commemorates in his notes.  The least touch in the world of such blood in his veins would be, of course, an appropriate circumstance in a dog belonging to an old ruined abbey.