Nowhere in this land of swelling hills and grassy fields can one get out of either sight or sound of running water. Every little dip in the hills has its watercourse, every vale its broader stream, and the pleasant sound of their murmurings and sweet babbling fills in the background of every remembrance of days spent upon the green slopes of the Cheviots. You may hear in their tones, if you listen, the shrill chatter and laughter of children, soft cooing voices, and the deeper notes of manhood, and might fancy, did not your sight contradict the fact, that you were close to a goodly company, whose words met your ear, but whose magic language you could not understand. One little burn of my acquaintance, which runs through field and dell to join the Till, I have hearkened to again and again for hours, unable to break away from the spell of its ever-varying, yet constant music—a sort of wilder, sweeter version of Mendelssohn’s Duetto, with the voices of Knight and Lady alternating and intermingling amidst a rippling current of clear bell-like undertones. Down from Cheviot itself, the lovely little Colledge Water splashes its way, issuing from the wild ravine called the Henhole, where the cliffs on each side of the rocky gorge rise in some places to a height of more than two hundred feet. Concerning this ravine, there is a legend that a party of hunters, long ages ago, were deer-stalking in Cheviot Forest, when on reaching the Henhole their ears were greeted by the most ravishing music they had ever heard. Allured by the enchanting sounds, they followed the music into the ravine, where they disappeared, and were never again seen. The range of the Cheviot Hills stretches for about twenty-two miles along the north-west border of Northumberland; and as the width of the range is, roughly speaking, twenty-one miles, we have a tract of over three hundred square miles of rolling, grassy, and heath-clad hills, of which about one-third is over the Scottish border in Roxburghshire. The giants of the range, The Cheviot (2,676 feet high), Cairn Hill (2,545 feet), and the striking cone of Hedgehope (2,348 feet), are all near to each other on Northumbrian soil, a few miles south-west of Wooler, which is a most convenient starting place for a visit to any part of the Cheviots, as the Alnwick and Cornhill Railway brings within easy reach the heights which lie still farther north.