p the westmost
division, another twenty miles, at least. But to follow the Border on
foot, by every bend of Tweedside, and over every nick and nook of the
Cheviots, and the remaining water-marches, means, as has been indicated,
a walk of not less than one hundred and ten miles. Almost everywhere in
the land portion of the Border line--the Cheviots generally--the
boundary is such that one may stand with one foot in England and the
other in Scotland, and the rather curious fact will be noted, says one
who has made this Border pilgrimage _par excellence_, that Scotland
nowhere receives a single rivulet from England, whilst she sends to
England tiny head-streams of the Coquet and Tyne only. The delimitation
is thus a quite natural and scientific one, coinciding pretty closely to
the water-parting of the two countries. Upon either side of this line of
demarcation stretches the Border Country, famous in war and verse the
whole world over--Northumberland and Cumberland to the south-east on
English soil, and to the north-west, Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, with
part of Dumfriesshire, the distinctively Border counties on the Scottish
side. A wider radius, however, has been given to the Scottish Border
from a very early period. Old Scots Acts of Parliament, applying to the
Border district, embrace the counties of Peebles and Selkirk within the
term, though these nowhere touch the frontier line, and portions of
Lanarkshire and the Lothians have been also included. But on the face of
it, these latter lie entirely outside the true Border limit. A line
drawn on the map from Coquetmouth to "Merrie Carlisle," thence to the
town of Dumfries, and again, almost due north, to Tweedsmuir (the source
of the Tweed) in Peeblesshire, and to Peebles itself, and from Peebles
eastward by the Moorfoots and Lammermoors to the German Ocean at St.
Abbs, will give us for all practical purposes what may be regarded as
the Border Country in its widest signification, geographical and
historical.

There is, of course, a narrower sense in which the phrase, the Border
Country, is used--the literary. That, however, applies almost entirely
to the Scottish side, for neither of the English Border counties owns a
tithe of the associations in literature and romance that belong to those
beyond the Tweed. The extraordinary glamour which has been cast over the
Tweed and its tributaries by the writings of Sir Walter Scott, the
Ettrick Shepherd, John Leyden, and others,