Tweed's Fountain Head

Away up among the hilJs of the southeru highlands Tweed first catches tfae ligbtofday. It is an ideal spot. Nature jjjreets you in her sweetest simplioity. You are ia a paradise land of peace. The sinoky city is miles distant. No village looms in sight. But one solitary habitation breaks the mouotony, if, indeed, it can be called mouotony. Pastoral soli tudes stretch out on every hand. The hills, beautifully rounded, ciad in all hues, beathered, benty, gorsy, grassy, descend with gentle slope to the green ineadow where Tweed'swell rises in its cooliug pool. Here at the fountain head it is on ly some three yards round, no more than a bubbling spring - a "well" caller, clear, inspiring - where you may stoop down and drink and experience in its deligbtsonie refreshment a thrill of poetic rapture from a scène so gloriously Arcadian. One is tempted to mnse at the shriue by the place of the old pilgrim cross and to read into Tweed's eource a parable of human life, with its first pure flow unmoved by storm and tempest, and as yet untainted by the gathering years. Round about Tweed's well there still cling to several places certain narues that recall tho historio associations of lon& c'áad davs. With the passing centuries the whole aspect of the district has chaaged. Kow it is a bare and treeless waste. The wind sweeps unhiudered trom farthest glen and hiiltop. And yet here the ancient forest of Caledon flourished, with its thousand birches and hazels. Here wandpred -..' old time Merlin.' the wild, weird, mad romancist of the Tweeddale hills; Taliessin, ' "Bard of the White Brow;" St. Kentigern, large souled apostle of Strathclyde, with a missionary zeal moving him to plant ohurches in the most outlying parts of bis provincft; Gwenddolen, priuce of the Cymri, resolutely defending his ancestral Druidism ; Ryddorch Hael of Roman birth, hero of the new Ohristian faith, and Arthur, shadowy and mystic, with his knights of brave renown, ready to face êvery dauger and to follow their liege lord into a)J his bloody battles. Of all these rnany traditions still survive in the pastoral solitudes of the upper Tweed. The wood of Caledou gave place to a still more famous forest of Etrrick, which embraced all the land between the Ettrick and Tweed valleys. And that, too, disappeared. The heather and "bent sae brown" wave on the lonely hills. The huntsman's hom has sonnded its requiem. The bleating of sneep, tho barking of the shepherds' dogs, the whirling of the whaup, the shrill piping of the peesweep and the music of the many mountain burns as they swish downward to the greater strearn are the chief sounds that now greet the