34 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



petal or dried leaf-stalk which now plays the magician to the 

 mind. In this case remembrance flies back to Wallace's Hill 

 in Selkirkshire, which overlooks the fair windings of the Tweed 

 until the mighty russet shoulders of Minch Moor close the 

 view. It brings back an autumnal Sunday morning and an 

 idle ramble with a friend over the heathery slopes, until, sitting 

 down by a Pictish fort, and gazing into the misty glens under 

 Dollar Law and Broad Law, and then up at the brotherhood 

 of envious hills which shut out the prospect from the Yarrow 

 Valley, the home of love and poetry, in an absent mood this sprig 

 of heather was plucked and carried so far homeward that it 

 seemed but kindly to preserve it between these leaves, just as 

 men grant a comfortable old age to a favourite horse. And now 

 this little dry twig marvellously reproduces that morning's 

 sights and sounds the stagshorn moss winding amongst the 

 heather-tufts with its delicate, amber-coloured spikes of fructi- 

 fication ; the whirr of the blackcock crossing a glen ; the rush 

 of a startled blue hare ; the red mutch of the old woman walk- 

 ing on the hill-path to Traquair Kirk ; the distant peep at the 

 massive walls of Traquair House, the last refuge of loyalty to 

 the Stuarts, where Charles Edward's cradle is reverentially pre- 

 served, and the front gates of the mansion may yet be seen 

 overgrown with several inches of turf, never having been opened 

 since its gallant owners rode through them to join the White 

 Rose in 1745. Nay, the subjects, even the very tones, of the 

 conversation once more awake to life, like the frozen notes in 

 the fairy tale ; and all this, thanks to the suggestiveness of a 

 little dried sprig of heather. 



It is matter of wonder why the thistle, with its defiant motto, 

 has been adopted as the emblem of Scotland rather than 

 the heather, which so regally mantles its hills. The rigid 

 angularities of the national character live, indeed, in one ; but 

 the tender grace, the breadth of colour, the fragility, and yet 

 the endurance of the heather, point to the higher and finer 



