Anniversary Address. 377 



by ledges of rocks, occasioning by their resistance to its flow 

 small rapids and tiny waterfalls, that oft relieve the far up 

 solitudes with their prattling noise; and yet in itself, when 

 passing to its level or collected into pools, a stream of very 

 little descent ; the current at times being almost asleep, and 

 inclined to linger on and on among the hindering masses of 

 Conferse, and the mosses, that with a fresh verdurese mantle 

 its edges in soft cushions, or anchoring in tufts or masses in 

 the fissures of rocks or stones, compel even barrenness itself 

 to vegetate in spangles of manifold beauty. It is for the most 

 part strictly confined between steep banks, which are very dry ; 

 and consist of braken-clad hollows, sections of rocky scaur, 

 either bare, or bosky with whin, or sloe, or brier ; with here 

 and there an abrupt, nearly naked cliff, bossed, and seamed, 

 and lichened over. Miniature Atlantas or Magdalas too there 

 are, where you pass through a gorge, with a break-neck rock 

 above you, and the blue sky for a canopy. To some banks 

 ivy contributes its dusky clothing ; natural elms stretch out 

 their shadowy arms, intermixed with lighter ashes ; and there 

 are detachments of hazel-shaw interwoven with the long 

 pendant branches of some hoary hawthorn ; and at intervals 

 scattered mountain ashes standing stiffly up. Some parts are 

 planted ; and there is a broader piece of wood towards the 

 lower end, where the banks recede at the same time that they 

 also rise, allowing between them room for a bottom, where 

 the burn, so quiescent in summer, plays pranks when swollen 

 with rains or melted snow ; and being aboundary, the trees 

 are transferred from one proprietor's side to another, as it 

 shifts its course, and require to be marked like sheep. 



Flora here has been beneficent. If we start by the mill- 

 lead above Eyemouth mill, there are Veronica Buxbaumiiy 

 now becoming universally diff'used, a bush or two of Tanacetum 

 vulgar e from some old " garden of herbs," and quite an orchard 

 of Rosa tomentosa and R. villosa. Passing on to the Ale, 

 Lychnis dioica empurples the hollow, plots of herb Mercury 

 cluster in the excess of sociality, and the giant grasses, Bromus 

 hirsutus and Triticum caninum wave their panicles by the 



