there was a Southron to be slain or a lady to be won, Patrick Hume cared no
more for bar, buttress, battlement, fire, or water, than did Jove for his
own thunder-cloud, under the shade of which he courted the daughter of
Inachus. Letting alone the recondite subject of "love's beginning," we
shall tread safer ground in stating, that the affection had been very
materially increased on both sides by the walls of Berwick; for, although
Patrick was a great despiser of fortifications, he had felt, in the affair
of his love for Isabella, the fair daughter of the Mayor of Berwick, that
there is no getting a damsel through a _loop-hole_, though there might be
poured as much sentimental and pathetic speech and sigh-breath through the
invidious opening, as ever passed through the free air that fills the
breeze under the trysting thorn.

What we have now said requires the explanation, that at the period of our
story, the town of Berwick belonged to the English; and the Mayor, being
himself either an Englishman, or connected by strong ties of relationship
with the English, had a strong antipathy towards the Scottish Border
raiders, whom he denominated as gentlemen-robbers, headed by the noble
robber Hume. But, above all, he hated young Patrick--into whose veins, he
said, there had been poured the distilled raid-venom and love-poison of all
the gentlemen-scaumers that ever infested the Borders. The origin of this
hatred had some connection with an affair of the Newmilne, belonging to
Berwick; the dam-dike of which, Patrick alleged, prevented the salmon from
getting up the river, and hence destroyed all his angling sport, as well as
that of all the noblemen and gentlemen that resorted to the river for the
purpose of practising the "gentle art." He had therefore threatened to pull
it down, to let up the fish; and sounded his threat in the ears of the
indignant Mayor, in terms that were, peradventure, made stronger and
bitterer by the thought that dikes and walls were his greatest bane upon
earth: by the walls of Berwick the Mayor kept from his arms the fair
Isabella, and by the dam-dike of Newmilne the same Mayor deprived him of
the pleasure of angling. Was such power on the part of a Mayor to be borne
by the high-spirited youth who had been trained to look upon mason-work as
a mere stimulant to love or war--a thing that raised the value of what it
enclosed by the opposition it offered to the young blood that raged for
entrance? The yout