On Thursday, Sept. 3rd, I left Newcastle, and proceeded first westward to the old town of Hexham, with the view of taking a more central route into Scotland. Here, too, are the ruins of one of the most ancient of the abbeys. The parish church wears the wrinkles of as many centuries as the oldest in the land. Indeed, the town is full of antiquities of different dates and races,--Roman, Scotch, Saxon, Danish and Norman. They all left the marks of their glaived hands upon it. From Hexham I faced northward and followed the North Tyne up through a very picturesque and romantic valley, thickly wooded and studded with baronial mansions, parks, castles and residences of gentry, with comfortable farm-houses looking sunny and cheerful on the green hill slopes and on the quiet banks of the river. I saw fields of wheat quite green, looking as if they needed another month's sun to fit them for harvesting. Lodged in a little village about eight miles from Hexham. The next day walked on to the little hamlet of Fallstones, a distance of about twenty miles. As I ascended the valley, the scene changed rapidly. The river dwindled to a narrow stream. The hills that walled it in on either side grew higher and balder, and the clouds lay cold and dank upon their bleak and sullen brows. The hamlets edged in here and there grew thinner, smaller and shabbier. The road was barred and gated about once in a mile, to keep cattle and sheep from wandering; there being no fences nor hedges running parallel with it. In a word, the premonitory symptoms of a bare border-land thickened at every turn. Another day brought me into the midst of a wild region, which might be called No-man's-land; although most of it belongs to the Duke of Northumberland. It is all in the solitary grandeur of heather- haired hills, which tinge, with their purple flush, the huge, black- winged clouds that alight upon them. Only here and there a shepherd's cottage is to be seen half way up the heights, or sheltering itself in a clump of trees in glen or gorge, like a benighted traveller bivouacking for a night in a desert. Sheep, of the Cheviot breed mostly, are nearly the sole inhabitants and industrials of this mountainous waste. They climb to the highest peaks and bring down the white wealth of their wool to man. It was pleasant to see them like walking mites, flecking the dark brows of the mountains. They made a picture; they made a tableau vivant of the same illustration as Landseer's lamb looking into the grass- covered cannon's mouth.