To another friend Scott wrote that the neighbours had “been much delighted with the procession of my furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets, and lances, made a very conspicuous show.  A family of turkeys was accommodated within the helmet of some preux chevalier of ancient border fame; and the very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets.  I assure your ladyship that this caravan attended by a dozen of ragged rosy peasant children, carrying fishing-rods and spears, and leading ponies, greyhounds, and spaniels, would, as it crossed the Tweed, have furnished no bad subject for the pencil, and really reminded me of one of the gipsy groups of Callot upon their march."[26]

The place thus bought for 4000_l._,—­half of which, according to Scott’s bad and sanguine habit, was borrowed from his brother, and half raised on the security of a poem at the moment of sale wholly unwritten, and not completed even when he removed to Abbotsford—­“Rokeby”—­became only too much of an idol for the rest of Scott’s life.  Mr. Lockhart admits that before the crash came he had invested 29,000_l._ in the purchase of land alone.  But at this time only the kernel of the subsequent estate was bought, in the shape of a hundred acres or rather more, part of which ran along the shores of the Tweed—­“a beautiful river flowing broad and bright over a bed of milk-white pebbles, unless here and there where it darkened into a deep pool, overhung as yet only by birches and alders.”  There was also a poor farm-house, a staring barn, and a pond so dirty that it had hitherto given the name of “Clarty Hole” to the place itself.  Scott renamed the place from the adjoining ford which was just above the confluence of the Gala with the Tweed.  He chose the name of Abbotsford because the land had formerly all belonged to the Abbots of Melrose,—­the ruin of whose beautiful abbey was visible from many parts of the little property.  On the other side of the river the old British barrier called “the Catrail” was full in view.  As yet the place was not planted,—­the only effort made in this direction by its former owner, Dr. Douglas, having been a long narrow stripe of firs, which Scott used to compare to a black hair-comb, and which gave the name of “The Doctor’s Redding-Kame” to the stretch of woods of which it is still the central line.  Such was the place which he made it the too great delight of the remainder of his life to increase and beautify, by spending on it a good deal more than he had earned, and that too in times when he should have earned a good deal more than he ought to have thought even for a moment of spending.  The cottage grew to a mansion, and the mansion to a castle.  The farm by the Tweed made him long for a farm by the Cauldshiel’s loch, and the farm by the Cauldshiel’s loch for Thomas the Rhymer’s Glen; and as, at every step in the ladder, his means of buying were really increasing—­though they were so cruelly discounted and forestalled by this growing land-hunger,—­Scott never realized into what troubles he was carefully running himself.