Two men above all others and everything else are responsible for the romantic fame which the bleak and largely barren Land of Scots enjoys the English-speaking world over.  If Robert Burns and Walter Scott had never told the tales and sung the songs of their native land, no endless streams of pilgrims would pour to its shrines and its history and traditions would be vastly second in interest to those of England and Wales.  But the Wizard of the North touched Scotia’s rough hills with the rosy hues of his romance.  He threw the glamour of his story around its crumbling ruins.  Through the magic of his facile pen, its petty chiefs and marauding nobles assumed heroic mould and its kings and queens—­rulers over a mere handful of turbulent people—­were awakened into a majestic reality.  Who would care aught for Prince Charlie or his horde of beggarly Highlanders were it not for the song of Burns and the story of Scott?  Nor would the melancholy fate of Queen Mary have been brought so vividly before the world—­but wherefore multiply instances to illustrate an admitted fact?

In Edinburgh we were near the center from which Scott’s vast influences radiated.  The traditions of Burns overshadowed Southwestern Scotland and the memories of Scott seem to be indentified with the cities, the villages, the solitary ruins, the hills and vales of the eastern coast.  We note as we pass along Princess Street, one of the finest thoroughfares in Britain, the magnificent monument to the great author—­the most majestic tribute ever erected to a literary man—­a graceful Gothic spire, towering two hundred feet into the sky.  The city is full of his memories.  Here are many of the places he celebrated in his stories, his haunts for years, and the house where he retired after financial disaster to face a self-chosen battle with a gigantic debt which he might easily have evaded by a mere figment of the law.

However, one can hardly afford to take from a motor tour the time which should rightly be given to Edinburgh, for the many attractions of the Athens of the North might well occupy a solid week.  Fortunately, a previous visit by rail two years before had solved the problem for us and we were fairly familiar with the more salient features of the city.  There is one side-trip that no one should miss, and though we had once journeyed by railway train to Melrose Abbey and Abbottsford House, we could not forego a second visit to these famous shrines and to Dryburgh Abbey, which we had missed before.  Thus again we had the opportunity of contrasting the motor car and the railway train.  I remembered distinctly our former trip to Melrose by rail.  It was on a Saturday afternoon holiday when crowds of trippers were leaving the city, packed in the uncomfortable compartments like sardines in a box—­not one in a dozen having a chance to sit.  We were driven from Melrose to Abbottsford House at a snail’s pace, consuming so much time that a trip to Dryburgh Abbey was out of the question, though we had left