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Had we started two or three hours earlier on our trip to Abbottsford and Melrose, we could easily have reached Jedburgh and Kelso, at each of which there are interesting abbey ruins. Of course it would have been a fine thing to go to the extreme northern point of Scotland, known as John O' Groats, but this, at the rate we traveled, would have consumed two or three days.
Abbottsford House is only three miles from Melrose, but it is closed to visitors after five o'clock and we missed a second visit, which we should have liked very much. Upon such things the motorist must fully inform himself or he is liable to many disappointments by reaching his objective point at the wrong time.
There is one side-trip that no one should miss, and though we had once journeyed by railway train to Melrose Abbey and Abbottsford House, we could not forego a second visit to these famous shrines and to Dryburgh Abbey, which we had missed before. Thus again we had the opportunity of contrasting the motor car and the railway train. I remembered distinctly our former trip to Melrose by rail.
Let no American traveller fancy he has seen England if he has not seen the Landlady of the village inn. If he has to miss one, he had better give up his visit to the Crystal Palace, Stratford-upon-Avon, Abbottsford, or even the House of Lords, or Windsor itself. Neither is so perfectly and exclusively English as the mistress of "The Brindled Cow," in one of the rural counties of the kingdom.
For twenty miles in sight are the battlemented cliffs of the Palisades. Mr. Searles was familiar with the facile pen of Washington Irving, and from the car caught sight of "Sunny Side" covered with nourishing vines, grown from slips, which Irving secured from Sir Walter Scott at Abbottsford.
It was on a Saturday afternoon holiday when crowds of trippers were leaving the city, packed in the uncomfortable compartments like sardines in a box not one in a dozen having a chance to sit. We were driven from Melrose to Abbottsford House at a snail's pace, consuming so much time that a trip to Dryburgh Abbey was out of the question, though we had left Edinburgh about noon.
Pilgrims from many lands visit it, as Shakespeare's birthplace, Burns' cottage, and Scott's Abbottsford attract their many thousands yearly. We recommend our readers to add to these this garret of Watt in their pilgrimages. Sinclair's "Development of the Locomotive" tends to deprive Stephenson of some part of his fame as inventor.
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