I could, easily, picture after picture. But when you come to think of it, he'd mentioned nothing as curious as motors, which we take quietly for granted, just as our forefathers took the wild beasts and the robbers.
We had a glimpse of Burns's "Eden scenes on crystal Jed," though only enough to be aggravating, for Basil said there were prehistoric caves, and scenery enough to make a journey to Scotland worth while, if one came for nothing else. But people in motor-cars never seem to turn aside for anything. They go toward their destination like creatures possessed. So, although Jedburgh is supposed to be the most historic town of the Lowlands, we hardly looked at it in our haste to see the Abbey, and to rush on to other Abbeys--a dayful of Abbeys! Not that Jedburgh put itself out to attract us. It had rather a grim air as a town, as if it hadn't quite forgotten the fierce slogan of the Jedburgh men, who shouted "Jethart's here!" as they wielded the terrible Jethart axes invented by themselves. And one isn't allowed to go inside Queen Mary's house to see the tapestry her ladies worked.
I wished to think no abbey so beautiful as Sweetheart Abbey, which was my first, and seen on the first night of the heather moon; but I had to tell myself that Jedburgh was lovelier, in its garden on the river-bank. Dreaming of its own reflection, its hollow, window-eyes could see, deep down under a glass, all its own history and legends preserved forever as in a crystal casket; the story of saintly King David who built it, and of the French friars who left their own Abbey at Beauvais to people it; better still, of the wedding with the spectre guest--the marriage of little French Jolette to Alexander, the last of the Celtic kings. Perhaps, too, the window-eyes peering into the crystal could see the figure of Sir Walter Scott, seeking and finding inspiration in the Abbey's old tales.
Basil, who told me the stories, read in a book that "Jedburgh is completer than Kelso or Dryburgh, and simpler and more harmonious than Melrose," so when the four boys appeared at last in Dryburgh Abbey, having calmly missed out Jedburgh and Kelso to save time, I used the criticism as if it were original, with great effect; for by that time _we_ had made a side dash to see lovely Kelso, where Sir Walter went to the Grammar School, and met Ballantyne, who long afterward published his novels and brought about his bankruptcy. I heard also, read out from the same book, that the stone of Dryburgh was taken from the quarry that built Melrose, and that the name Dryburgh meant "Druid." Even the boys, I think, could hardly help feeling the mysterious, haunting charm of the place, which was as strange and secret as if the dark yew trees and Lebanon cedars guarding the ruins were enchanted Druid priests. There was a Druid urn, too, which looked as if it knew all the secrets of the ages, and had held sacrificial blood.