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