he might have been alluding to the neighbours by whom Hotspur was surrounded. It is computed that no less than 2000 men must have been employed in a complicated system of day and night watching to guard against the lawless raids of the Middle Ages. The day watches began their duty at daylight, and blew a horn on the approach of the foe, and all men were bound on pain of death to follow the fray with hue and cry. Goods captured from the Scots were restored to the owner, and the capturer was rewarded. No man was permitted to speak to a Scotsman without leave from the warder, so great a terror did the inroads of the Northerners cause among the English. Perhaps there may have been a reverse to this picture, and the hands of the Englishmen were not quite clean. The conduct of the stout Earl of Northumberland in Chevy Chase is not such as we can well excuse. He certainly had no pretence of right on his side to take three summer days of pleasure in the Scottish woods, and kill and bring back to Alnwick the chiefest harts in Douglas’s manor. This must always have struck even the most youthful admirer of the beautiful ballad. Then they were not satisfied with moderate, or indeed excellent sport. A hundred fallow deer did not appease the “stout Earl” and his friends, for they seem to have coolly prepared for further hunting. The chronicler simply says-- “And long before high noon they had A hundred fat bucks slain; Then, having dined, the drovers went To rouse them up again.” This ballad is evidently written in the interests of the English, and whoever may have been generally most to blame in the Border quarrels, it is clear that the English on the occasion of Chevy Chase had a good deal of wrong on their side. The waits were suppressed in 1831 by the Corporation. They used to last from Martinmas to January, and Mr. Tate remembers the criers perambulating the town at night with a “Good morrow, masters all! half-past three on a frosty morning;” and once or twice a week altering their apostrophe to the name of a householder, “Good morrow, Mistress Turner! half-past two on a cloudy morning.” Singular as such customs may seem now, it is only a comparatively few years since constables used to perambulate the city at night time in Liverpool and other large towns, using almost similar language. Fortunately the establishment of new police has deprived them of the power of paying off some old grudge against any particular inhabitant who might be supposed to require information about the time of night and the state of the weather; and the watchman with his lantern has now become a thing of the past,--more so even than mail-coaches with their rumbles and horns, which, indeed, have not even yet disappeared from some of the more remote parts of the island. [Illustration: HEXHAM.]