hted up his own beacon. The signal was
immediately repeated through all the valleys on the English Border. If
the beacon at Saint Abb's Head had been fired, the alarm would have
run northward, and roused all Scotland. But the watch at this important
point judiciously considered, that if there had been an actual or
threatened descent on our eastern sea-coast, the alarm would have come
along the coast and not from the interior of the country.

Through the Border counties the alarm spread with rapidity, and on no
occasion when that country was the scene of perpetual and unceasing
war, was the summons to arms more readily obeyed. In Berwickshire,
Roxburghshire, and Selkirkshire, the volunteers and militia got under
arms with a degree of rapidity and alacrity which, considering the
distance individuals lived from each other, had something in it very
surprising--they poured to the alarm-posts on the sea-coast in a state so
well armed and so completely appointed, with baggage, provisions, etc.,
as was accounted by the best military judges to render them fit for
instant and effectual service.

There were some particulars in the general alarm which are curious
and interesting. The men of Liddesdale, the most remote point to the
westward which the alarm reached, were so much afraid of being late in
the field, that they put in requisition all the horses they could find,
and when they had thus made a forced march out of their own country,
they turned their borrowed steeds loose to find their way back through
the hills, and they all got back safe to their own stables. Another
remarkable circumstance was, the general cry of the inhabitants of the
smaller towns for arms, that they might go along with their companions.
The Selkirkshire Yeomanry made a remarkable march, for although some
of the individuals lived at twenty and thirty miles' distance from the
place where they mustered, they were nevertheless embodied and in
order in so short a period, that they were at Dalkeith, which was their
alarm-post, about one o'clock on the day succeeding the first signal,
with men and horses in good order, though the roads were in a bad state,
and many of the troopers must have ridden forty or fifty miles without
drawing bridle. Two members of the corps chanced to be absent from their
homes, and in Edinburgh on private business. The lately married wife of
one of these gentlemen, and the widowed mother of the other, sent the
arms, uniforms, and ch