feels
amidst the "mountain infinities." "I assure you," he says, "I have felt
really oppressed with a sort of fearful loneliness when looking around
these naked towering ridges of desolate barrenness." The picture seen
from such a height is both an inspiring and a humbling one. Beneath, it
is a veritable earth-ocean that we are gazing upon. On all sides an
innumerable series of what look like huge elephant-backed ranges are
seen to be chasing each other like waves of the sea, as it were, ridge
after ridge, rising, flowing, falling, and passing into the one beyond
it, as far as the eye can reach. Enclosed between each we know are the
rushing hill-burns and broader streams by which the Border country is
everywhere so much blessed and beautified. At such a height we are
entirely outside the human touches--altogether alone with Nature at her
simplest and solemnest. The cry of a startled sheep and the summer hum
of insects on the hill-top--

"That undefined and mingled hum,
Voice of the desert, never dumb"--

are the only indications of life where all trace and feeling of man and
his work have disappeared. Occasionally we shall meet by chance with the
shepherd, maybe, who has his dwelling far down among the "hopes"--the
cul-de-sacs of the uplands. Amongst those hills he lives and moves and
has his being. All sorts of weather-conditions find him at his work. He
never thinks of the loneliness, and the winter storms have not the
terrors for him as for his predecessors. In some respects his life is an
ideal one, and his class has a goodly record for intelligence and fine
physique. The best specimens, indeed, of the country's manhood are drawn
from the agricultural labouring classes--the "herds" and "hinds" who
make up the bulk of the population in the purely rural districts. For
agriculture, it need scarcely be said, is the staple business of both
Borders. The Tweed industry, to be sure, affords employment to
thousands, but on the Borders, as elsewhere, the land is the crucial
problem. Within recent years many of the rural parishes have been
woefully depleted, and until the land question is fairly tackled there
seems small hope for a fresh and brighter chapter in the domestic
history of the Border Country.

A hundred years have transformed the face of the Border Country in a
marked manner. The development of agriculture, and the growth of the
tree-planting spirit, which began to bestir itself about the beginning
of l