thinner, smaller
and shabbier. The road was barred and gated about once in a mile,
to keep cattle and sheep from wandering; there being no fences nor
hedges running parallel with it. In a word, the premonitory
symptoms of a bare border-land thickened at every turn.

Another day brought me into the midst of a wild region, which might
be called No-man's-land; although most of it belongs to the Duke of
Northumberland. It is all in the solitary grandeur of heather-
haired hills, which tinge, with their purple flush, the huge, black-
winged clouds that alight upon them. Only here and there a
shepherd's cottage is to be seen half way up the heights, or
sheltering itself in a clump of trees in glen or gorge, like a
benighted traveller bivouacking for a night in a desert. Sheep, of
the Cheviot breed mostly, are nearly the sole inhabitants and
industrials of this mountainous waste. They climb to the highest
peaks and bring down the white wealth of their wool to man. It was
pleasant to see them like walking mites, flecking the dark brows of
the mountains. They made a picture; they made a tableau vivant of
the same illustration as Landseer's lamb looking into the grass-
covered cannon's mouth.

This is the Border-land! Here the fiercest antagonisms of hostile
nationalities met in deadly conflict. Fire and blood, rapine and
wrath blackened and reddened and ravaged for centuries across this
bleak territory. Robber-chieftains and knighted free-booters
carried on their guerilla raids backward and forward, under the
counterfeited banner of patriotism. Scotch and English armies led
by kings marched and counter-marched over this sombre boundary.
Never before was there one apparently more insoluble as a barrier
between two peoples. Never before in Christendom was there one that
required a longer space of time to melt. Never before did the
fusing of two nationalities encounter more fierce and prolonged
opposition. Did ever patriotism pour out a swifter and deeper tide
of chivalrous sentiment against merging one in another?--against
uniting two thrones and two peoples in one? Did patriotism ever
fight bloodier battles to prevent such a union, or cling to local
sovereignty with a more desperate hold?

This is the Border-land! Look up the purpled steeps of these
heathered hills. The white lambs are looking, with their soft, meek
eyes, into the grass-choked mouths of the rusty and dismantled
cannon of the war of nationa