After leaving Newcastle we glide past a gentle, winding ravine, thickly wooded on both its sides, with a bright stream glancing in its depth. The meadows all around are green, fresh, and smiling, and soon our road skirts beautiful Morpeth, bestriding a dark and lovely river and crouched in a bosky dell. At Widdrington the land shelves downward, the trees become sparse, and you catch a faint glimpse of the sea,--the broad blue wilderness of the Northern Ocean. From this point onward the panorama is one of perfect and unbroken loveliness. Around you are spacious meadows of fern, diversified with clumps of fir-trees, and the sweet wind that blows upon your face seems glad and buoyant with its exultant vitality. At Warkworth Castle, once the home of the noble Hotspur, the ocean view is especially magnificent,--the brown and red sails of the ships and various craft descried at sea contributing to the prospect a lovely element of picturesque character. Alnwick, with its storied associations of "the Percy out of Northumberland," is left to the westward, while on the east the romantic village of Alnmouth woos the traveller with an irresistible charm. No one who has once seen that exquisite place can ever be content without seeing it again,--and yet there is no greater wisdom in the conduct of life than to avoid forever a second sight of any spot where you have once been happy. This village, with its little lighthouse and graceful steeple, is built upon a promontory in the sea, and is approached over the sands by a long, isolated road across a bridge of four fine arches. All the country-side in this region is rich. At Long Houghton a grand church uprears its vast square tower, lonely and solemn in its place of graves. Royal Berwick comes next, stately and serene upon its ocean crag, with the white-crested waves curling on its beach and the glad waters of the Tweed kissing the fringes of its sovereign mantle, as they rush into the sea. The sun is sinking now, and over the many-coloured meadows, red and brown and golden and green, the long, thin shadows of the trees slope eastward and softly hint the death of day. The sweet breeze of evening stirs the long grasses, and on many a gray stone house shakes the late pink and yellow roses and makes the ivy tremble. It is Scotland now, and as we pass through the storied Border we keep the ocean almost constantly in view,--losing it for a little while at Dunbar, but finding it again at Drem,--till, past the battlefield of Prestonpans, and past the quaint villages of Cockenzie and Musselburgh and the villas of Portobello, we come slowly to a pause in the shadow of Arthur's Seat, where the great lion crouches over the glorious city of Edinburgh. CHAPTER XVII INTO THE HIGHLANDS