540 Wild Daffodil at Chirnside. By Dr. Chas. Stuart. 



where it would best serve their individual convenience and 

 advantage. It was in these circumstances that Mr Hall, usiug 

 his professional skill, made a personal survey of the whole line, 

 prepared plans with drawings and sections, etc. for the work, 

 and a statement of the reasons for adopting the route which he 

 had chosen. When the day arrived on which they were to meet 

 and come to a decision, the other proprietors, knowing well 

 enough that Mr Hall's scheme was unassailable on its merits, 

 but knowing also that it did not suit their private interests, had 

 preconcerted a way to defeat it. They knew Mr Hall's peculiar- 

 ities of temper, that contradiction at once so disturbed him as to 

 unfit him to sustain an argument and defend his opinions ; and 

 so as pre-arranged, some of them, when Mr Hall had produced 

 his plans and was proceeding to expound them, interrupted him 

 with some absurd objections. As they had anticipated, he at 

 once lost his temper ; began to stutter and stammer, and then in 

 angry disgust, gathered up his papers and left the room. 

 Having thus got quit of him and his judicious plans, they 

 proceeded to adopt others to suit their selfish ends, and inflicted 

 upon the community in perpetuo, the line as we see it, with its 

 outrageous gradients and course so circuitous as to make it longer 

 nearly by two miles than was necessary. Mr Hall was a man of 

 taste, an enthusiastic botanist, 'and a zealous agricultural 

 improver. He was among the earliest in the distinct to enclose 

 and subdivide his estate. It was he who laid out and planted the 

 woods which still in part remain. He had purposed to build a 

 handsome mansion on the site still marked out by the Bowling 

 Green in front of it, and the avenues of yew and holly, which in 

 my boyhood were intact and exquisitely beautiful. They have 

 since been ruthlessly destroyed in excavating the bed of gravel 

 over which they grew. The sheets of Snowdrops and Daffodils, 

 with every returning spring, still recall the memory of the kindly 

 Laird who planted them. From what my grandfather used to 

 tell of the height of the young Beeches in the Hundred-foot 

 plantation, in his school-boy days, it must have been planted in 

 1740. The first Swedish Turnips grown in Berwickshire as a 

 field crop, were on Whitehall Home Farm. The first trial was 

 eminently successful, whereupon Mr Hall had some of the roots 

 transplanted into his nursery to produce seeds. The produce of 

 this home raised seed proved utterly worthless, on which Mr Hall 

 concluded that our Scotch climate was unsuitable for this plant, 



