Two great incidents of Border warfare stand out before all others--Otterburn and Flodden. Old Froissart has told the story of Otterburn. The Scottish barons, tired of the fickleness and inactivity of their king, determined to invade England, met at Aberdeen, and arranged the preliminaries for a great gathering at Southdean, beyond Jedburgh. On the day appointed the best blood in Scotland was assembled. "There had not been for sixty years so numerous an assembly--they amounted to twelve hundred spears and forty thousand other men and archers." The Earl of Douglas, the Earl of March and Dunbar, and the Earl of Moray, with three hundred picked lancers and two thousand infantry, burst into Northumberland, rode south as far as Durham, and laid waste the country. In one of their encounters before Newcastle-on-Tyne the Earl of Douglas had a hand-to-hand combat with Sir Henry Percy--- Hotspur,--who was overthrown, Douglas seizing his pennon--the silken streamer bearing his insignia, which was fastened near the head of his lance. In triumph he exclaimed: "I will carry this token of your prowess with me into Scotland, and place it on the tower of my castle at Dalkeith, that it may be seen from afar." "By God, Earl of Douglas," replied Hotspur, "you shall not even bear it out of Northumberland; be assured you shall never have this pennon to boast of." "You must come then," answered Douglas, "this night and seek for it. I will fix your pennon before my tent, and shall see if you will venture to take it away." On the following evening the Scottish army "lighted high on Otterburn," in Redesdale, and there Sir Henry and Ralph Percy, with six hundred spears of knights and squires and upwards of eight thousand infantry, fell upon the Scots, who were but three hundred lances, and two thousand others. The fight that followed was one of the most spirited in history, and ended in the death of Douglas, the capture of Hotspur, the serious wounding of his brother, and the killing or capture of one thousand and forty Englishmen on the field, the capture of eight hundred and forty others in the pursuit, and the wounding of a thousand more. The Scots lost only one hundred slain and two hundred captured. "It was," says Froissart, "the hardest and most obstinate battle ever fought." The tragic incidents of this encounter have been kept alive not historically but poetically. It is the immortality of song which preserves the memory of Otterburn. No contest was more emphatically the "ballad-singer's joy." Two ballads, the one Scots, the other English, give their respective versions of the event with those natural discrepancies between the two, which may easily be accounted for on patriotic grounds. That given in Scott's "Minstrelsy" is unquestionably the finer, and contains the lines so often quoted by Scott himself, and at no occasion more pathetically than during his visit--pretty near the end--to the old Douglas shrines in Lanarkshire, the locality of "Castle Dangerous":