408 Dr George Johnston on the 
spot, with patches of nettles, in the midst of the moors, 
marks “the Highland clearing.” We have heard old men 
tell how, in their boyhood, they climbed the ash trees to take 
the nest and young of the goldfinches, which annually resort- 
ed there to breed; and how the numbers of these pretty birds 
gradually decreased, as improving agriculture destroyed the 
thistles and other weeds which are essential to their exist- 
ence. ‘There is an old saying quoted by our author, “ It is 
not too late to sow barley when the leaves of the ash cover 
the pyet’s nest.” This shows the familiarity of one of our 
Shyest birds before the era of game-preserving arrived. 
Amongst other memorial-flowers of human habitations we 
have the wallflower, which, we are told, “ is a suggestive 
flower, and marks the era of the decline and fall of the rude 
feudal times.’” The daffodil and the primrose annually re- 
appear in beauty in a field which occupies the site of the 
Garden of the Hospital of Maison-Dieu, near Kelso. Stragg- 
ling lines of old plane-trees indicate the greater extent of 
several border villages in past ages. “ It throws him (the bo- 
tanical rambler) back on past days, when he who planted the 
tree was owner of the land and of the hall, and whose name 
and race are forgotten even by tradition. Alas! for that for- 
getfulness which waits upon humanity,—especially on that 
which had only the virtues of a retired life and secret bene- 
volence to preserve it! ‘ There is reasonable pride in the 
ancestry, when a grove of gentlemanly old sycamores still 
shadows the hall.’ ” 
The dreadful state of the English borders, so late as 1561, 
is aptly illustrated in an ordinance enjoining the planting of 
hawthorn hedges around the crofts or closes environing the 
villages, as a defence against the incursions of the Scottish 
mosstroopers. It was the soldiers of Cromwell who first 
planted hawthorn hedges in Scotland, in 1650; but they 
were little regarded till a century later, when agriculture 
first began decidedly to advance. It would appear, from a 
quotation by the author, that the holly had been used as 
a hedge-plant in the days of Wallace. Until the roads 
were so far improved as to admit of the use of wheel- 
carriages, the inhabitants of the district were badly off for 
