There was a Border-land, dark and bloody, between Saxon England and Celtic Wales. For centuries the red foot-marks of savage conflict scarred and covered its wild waste. Never before did so small a people make so stout, and desperate and protracted struggle for local independence and isolation. Never did one produce a more strong-hearted and blind-eyed patriotism, or patriotism more poets to thrill the listeners to their lays with the intoxicating fanaticism of a national sentiment. On that Border-land the white lambs now lie in the sun. The Welsh sentiment is as strong as ever in the Snowdon shepherd, and he may not speak a dozen words of the English tongue. But the Briton lives in his breast. The feeling of its great meaning surrounds and illumines the inner circles of his local attachment. He may never have seen a map of the Globe, and never have been outside the wall of the Welsh mountains; but he knows, without geography, who and what Queen Victoria is among the earth's sovereigns, and the length and breadth of her sceptre's reach and rule around the world. There was a Border-land between Britain and Ireland, blackened and scarred by more burning antagonisms than those that once divided the larger island. The record of several consecutive centuries is graven deep in it by the brand and bayonet, and by the more incisive teeth-marks of hate. The slumbering antipathies of race and religion even now crop out here and there, over the unfused boundary, in hissing tongues of flame. The Briton and the Celt are still struggling for the precedence in the Irishman's breast; but it is not a war of extermination. His ardent nature is given to martial memories, and all the battles he boasts of are British battles, in which he or his father played the hero number one. The history of independent Ireland is poor and thin; still he holds it back in his heart, and hesitates to link it with the great annals of the "Saxon" realm, and thus make of both one grand and glorious record, present and future. He cannot yet make up his mind to say _We_ with all the other English-speaking millions of the empire, as the Scotsman and Welshman have learned and loved to say it. He cannot as yet say _Our_ with them with such a sentiment of joint- interest, when the histories, hopes, expansion and capacities of that empire unroll their vista before him. But the rains and the dews of a milder century are falling upon this Border-land. The lava of spent volcanoes that covered it is taking soil and seed of green vegetation. The white lambs shall yet lie on it in the sun.