good miles more. Stretching diagonally across the country—north-east or south-west—we have the river Tweed as eastmost boundary for a considerable space—close on twenty miles; then comes the lofty barrier of the Cheviots extending to thirty odd miles, constituting the middle portion of the Border line; and finally, the Kershope Burn, with the Liddel and Esk Waters, and the small stream of the Sark, make up the westmost division, another twenty miles, at least. But to follow the Border on foot, by every bend of Tweedside, and over every nick and nook of the Cheviots, and the remaining water-marches, means, as has been indicated, a walk of not less than one hundred and ten miles. Almost everywhere in the land portion of the Border line—the Cheviots generally—the boundary is such that one may stand with one foot in England and the other in Scotland, and the rather curious fact will be noted, says one who has made this Border pilgrimage par excellence, that Scotland nowhere receives a single rivulet from England, whilst she sends to England tiny head-streams of the Coquet and Tyne only. The delimitation is thus a quite natural and scientific one, coinciding pretty closely to the water-parting of the two countries. Upon either side of this line of demarcation stretches the Border Country, famous in war and verse the whole world over—Northumberland and Cumberland to the south-east on English soil, and to the north-west, Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, with part of Dumfriesshire, the distinctively Border counties on the Scottish side. A wider radius, however, has been given to the Scottish Border from a very early period. Old Scots Acts of Parliament, applying to the Border district, embrace the counties of Peebles and Selkirk within the term, though these nowhere touch the frontier line, and portions of Lanarkshire and the Lothians have been also included. But on the face of it, these latter lie entirely outside the true Border limit. A line drawn on the map from Coquetmouth to "Merrie Carlisle," thence to the town of Dumfries, and again, almost due north, to Tweedsmuir (the source of the Tweed) in Peeblesshire, and to Peebles itself, and from Peebles eastward by the Moorfoots and Lammermoors to the German Ocean at St. Abbs, will give us for all practical purposes what may be regarded as the Border Country in its widest signification, geographical and historical.

There is, of course, a narrower sense in which the phrase, the Border Country, is used—the literary. That, however, applies almost entirely to the Scottish side, for neither of the English Border counties owns a tithe of the associations in literature and romance that belong to those beyond the Tweed. The extraordinary glamour which has been cast over the Tweed and its tributaries by the writings of Sir Walter Scott, the Ettrick Shepherd, John Leyden, and others, has given a prominence to the Scottish side which is nowhere shared by its southern neighbour. But to say so is no disparagement to the English side. For what it lacks in literature it makes up in other admirable characteristics. Both Borders are rich in historical memories. Their natural features are not dissimilar, and in commercial prosperity they are much akin. In union they have long been happily wedded.

The Border Country is a region of streams and hills which hardly rise to the dignity of rivers and mountains. Unlike the Clyde, the Tweed has no broad estuary laden with the commerce of the world. And the highest summits, Broad Law (2754 feet) in Scotland, and the great Cheviot (2676 feet) in England, have nothing in common with the rugged Highland peaks except their height. Both, it has been said, are monuments of denudation only, "lofty because they have suffered less wear than their neighbours."

It is difficult to imagine all this attractive Border Country as at one period a vast ocean-bed, over which waves lashed in furious foam, and sea-birds shrieked and flew amid the war of waters. Yet geology assures us such was its condition ages ago. By-and-by, it became a great rolling plain or table-land, and in age after age—how many and how long it were vain to speculate—there was carried on that stupendous process by which those fair green hills and glens have been so marvellously scooped out, and moulded and rounded into the objects of beauty that we see about us now. In the great glacier movements, in the working of the ice-sheets, and under the influences of frost, beating rain, and a constant water-flow operating through a countless series of years, we have the scientific explanation of their present benign and comfortable-looking appearance. The Border hills are of a purely pastoral type, grass-grown from base to summit, and usually easy of ascent. Here and there one meets with a distinctly Highland picture—in the deep dark glens down Moffatdale, for instance, but in the main they exhibit "the sonsie, good-humoured, buirdly look," for which Dr. "Rab" Brown expressed the liveliest predilection. Once at the curiously plateau-like summit of Broadlaw (out-topped in Southern Scotland by the Galloway Merrick only) or Hart Fell (2651 feet), or the Cheviot, the feeling amounts to a kind of awe even. Scott speaks of the silence of noonday on the top of Minchmoor, and the acute sense of human littleness one always feels amidst the "mountain infinities." "I assure you," he says, "I have felt really oppressed with a sort of fearful loneliness when looking around these naked towering ridges of desolate barrenness." The picture seen from such a height is both an inspiring and a humbling one. Beneath, it is a veritable earth-ocean that we are gazing upon. On all sides an innumerable series of what look like huge elephant-backed ranges are seen to be chasing each other like waves of the sea, as it were, ridge after ridge, rising, flowing, falling, and passing into the one beyond it, as far as the eye can reach. Enclosed between each we know are the rushing hill-burns and broader streams by which the Border country is everywhere so much blessed and beautified. At such a height we are entirely outside the human touches—altogether alone with Nature at her simplest and solemnest. The cry of a startled sheep and the summer hum of insects on the hill-top—

are the only indications of life where all trace and feeling of man and his work have disappeared. Occasionally we shall meet by chance with the shepherd, maybe, who has his dwelling far down among the "hopes"—the cul-de-sacs of the uplands. Amongst those hills he lives and moves and has his being. All sorts of weather-conditions find him at his work. He never thinks of the loneliness, and the winter storms have not the terrors for him as for his predecessors. In some respects his life is an ideal one, and his class has a goodly record for intelligence and fine physique. The best specimens, indeed, of the country's manhood are drawn from the agricultural labouring classes—the "herds" and "hinds" who make up the bulk of the population in the purely rural districts. For agriculture, it need scarcely be said, is the staple business of both Borders. The Tweed industry, to be sure, affords employment to thousands, but on the Borders, as elsewhere, the land is the crucial problem. Within recent years many of the rural parishes have been woefully depleted, and until the land question is fairly tackled there seems small hope for a fresh and brighter chapter in the domestic history of the Border Country.

A hundred years have transformed the face of the Border Country in a marked manner. The development of agriculture, and the growth of the tree-planting spirit, which began to bestir itself about the beginning of