embered. The Wordsworths were at
Mosspaul in 1803, and Dorothy's description is still fairly correct:
"The scene with its single dwelling, was melancholy and wild, but not
dreary, though there was no tree nor shrub; the small streamlet
glittered, the hills were populous with sheep; but the gentle bending of
the valley and the correspondent softness in the forms of the hills were
of themselves enough to delight the eye. The whole of the Teviot and the
pastoral steeps about Mosspaul pleased us exceedingly."

PLATE 19

BERWICK-ON-TWEED

FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH

PAINTED BY

JAMES ORROCK, R.I.

(_See pp. 43, 49, 63, 93_)

[Illustration]

At Teviothead we touch the Teviot proper. The upper basin of the Teviot
is mainly a barren vale, flanked by lofty rounded hills. For a greater
distance it is a strip of alluvial plain, screened by terraced banks
clad with the rankest vegetation, and with long stretches of undulating
dale-land, and overhung at from three to eight miles by terminating
heights, and in its lower reaches it is a richly variegated champaign
country, possessing all the luxuriance without any of the tameness of a
fertile plain, and stretching away in resulting loveliness to the
picturesque Eildons on the one hand and the dome-like Cheviots on the
other. Teviothead, formerly Carlanrigg, is full of traditionary lore.
Teviot Stone, extinct now, a landmark for centuries--its position being
marked on some of our earliest maps--recalls Scott's favourite lines
from the "Lay," imprinted on the Selkirk monument:

"By Yarrow's streams, still let me stray,
Though none should guide my feeble way;
Still feel the breeze down Ettrick break,
Although it chill my withered cheek;
Still lay my head by Teviot Stone,
Though there, forgotten and alone,
The Bard may draw his parting groan."

Teviothead Churchyard contains the graves of Johnie Armstrong of
Gilnockie, and his gallants. James V. (a mere boy-king at the time)
never planned a more despicable or more atrocious deed than the betrayal
and summary execution of this most picturesque of the freebooters. And
posterity has never forgiven him. Nor can it. Scott's "Minstrelsy"
ballad commemorating the incident is far and away the most dramatic of
its kind, Johnie's scathing answer to the King being specially
characteristic:

"To seik het water beneith cauld ice,
Surely it is a greit follie;
I have asked grace at a