eisurely
walking down the banks of the great border river. Every curve of the
stream had its natural beauty intertwined with some association of
history or the poets, from the first morning on Neidpath Fell, to the
fourth evening when

'Day set on Norham's castled steep,
And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,
And Cheviot's mountains lone.
The battled towers, the donjon keep,
The loophole grates where captives weep,
The flanking walls that round it sweep'--

are all still there, though the inmates are no longer captives. Norham
is, indeed, best known as the scene of the whole of the first canto of
'Marmion.' In that poem Sir Hugh the Heron is supposed to have been Lord
of it, while his wife is away in Scotland, prepared to sing ballads of
Lochinvar to the ill-fated King on his last evening in Holyrood. But
when Knox, delivered from the galleys, preached in Berwick in 1549, the
Captain of the Hold of Norham, only six miles off, was Richard Bowes.
And his lady, born Elizabeth Aske, and co-heiress of Aske in Yorkshire
(already an elderly woman and mother of _fifteen children_), became
Knox's chief friend, and after he left Berwick for Newcastle his
correspondent, chiefly as to her religious troubles. Most of the letters
of Knox to her which are preserved are in the year 1553, and one of the
earliest of these acknowledges a communication 'from you and my dearest
spouse.' This means that Marjory Bowes, the fifth daughter in that large
household, had already been _sponsa_ or betrothed, with her mother's
consent, to the Scottish preacher. Knox, now forty-eight years old, had
recently declined an English bishopric, offered him through the Duke of
Northumberland, but was still chaplain to the King. A letter to
Marjory, undated, follows, in which he explains to his 'dearly beloved
sister' some passages of Scripture, and adds--'The Spirit of God shall
instruct your heart what is most comfortable to the troubled conscience
of your mother.' This communication ends with the subdued or sly
postscript, 'I think this be the first letter that ever I wrote to
you.'[32] In July, while Knox was in London, Mary Tudor ascended the
throne, and everything began to look threatening. In September Knox
acknowledges the 'boldness and constancy' of Mrs Bowes in pushing his
cause with her husband, who was as yet 'unconvinced in religion,' but he
urges her not to trouble herself too much in the matter. He would
himself press