346 A Walk from 



arms, devices and inscriptions are all here presented to 

 the eye like the printed page of an open volume. 

 Among the interesting relics are a chair made from the 

 rafters of the house in which Wallace was betrayed, 

 Rob Roy's pistol, and the key of the old Tolbooth of 

 Edinburgh. 



I was conducted through the rooms opened to visitors 

 by a very gentlemanly-looking man, who might be 

 taken for an author himself, from his intellectual ap- 

 pearance and conversation. The library is the largest 

 of all the apartments fifty feet by sixty. Nor is it 

 too large for the collection of books it contains, which 

 numbers about 20,000 volumes, many of them very 

 rare and valuable. But the soul-centre of the building 

 to me was the study, opening into the library. There 

 is the small writing-table, and there is the plain arm- 

 chair in which he sat by it and worked out those 

 creations of fancy which have excited such interest 

 through the world. That square foot over against 

 this chair, where his paper lay, is the focus, the point 

 of incidence and reflection, of thoughts that pencilled 

 outward, like sun-rays, until their illumination 

 reached the antipodes, thoughts that brought a plea- 

 sant shining to the sun-burnt face of the Australian 

 shepherd as he watched his flock at noon from under 

 the shadow of a stunted tree ; thoughts which made 



