[Illustration:  THE CHANCEL, MELROSE ABBEY.]

Melrose Abbey was said to afford the finest specimen of Gothic architecture and Gothic sculpture of which Scotland could boast, and the stone of which it had been built, though it had resisted the weather for many ages, retained perfect sharpness, so that even the most minute ornaments seemed as entire as when they had been newly wrought.  In some of the cloisters there were representations of flowers, leaves, and vegetables carved in stone with “accuracy and precision so delicate that it almost made visitors distrust their senses when they considered the difficulty of subjecting so hard a substance to such intricate and exquisite modulation.”  This superb convent was dedicated to St. Mary, and the monks were of the Cistercian Order, of whom the poet wrote: 

  Oh, the monks of Melrose made gude kail (broth)
    On Fridays when they fasted;
  Nor wanted they gude beef and ale,
    So lang’s their neighbours’ lasted.

There were one hundred monks at Melrose in the year 1542, and it was supposed that in earlier times much of the carving had been done by monks under strong religious influences.  The rose predominated amongst the carved flowers, as it was the abbot’s favourite flower, emblematic of the locality from which the abbey took its name.  The curly green, or kale, which grew in nearly every garden in Scotland, was a very difficult plant to sculpture, but was so delicately executed here as to resemble exactly the natural leaf; and there was a curious gargoyle representing a pig playing on the bagpipes, so this instrument must have been of far more ancient origin than we had supposed when we noticed its absence from the instruments recorded as having been played when Mary Queen of Scots was serenaded in Edinburgh on her arrival in Scotland.

[Illustration:  ENTRANCE TO MELROSE ABBEY.]

Under the high altar were buried the remains of Alexander II, the dust of Douglas the hero of Otterburn, and others of his illustrious and heroic race, as well as the remains of Sir Michael Scott.  Here too was buried the heart of King Robert the Bruce.  It appeared that Bruce told his son that he wished to have his heart buried at Melrose; but when he was ready to die and his friends were assembled round his bedside, he confessed to them that in his passion he had killed Comyn with his own hand, before the altar, and had intended, had he lived, to make war on the Saracens, who held the Holy Land, for the evil deeds he had done.  He requested his dearest friend, Lord James Douglas, to carry his heart to Jerusalem and bury it there.  Douglas wept bitterly, but as soon as the king was dead he had his heart taken from his body, embalmed, and enclosed in a silver case which he had made for it, and wore it suspended from his neck by a string of silk and gold.  With some of the bravest men in Scotland he set out for Jerusalem, but, landing in Spain, they were persuaded