Berwick is one of the very few English towns which still retain their ancient fortifications. The circuit of the walls, which were built in the reign of Elizabeth, with their bastions, "mounts," and gates, is still practically complete, and is preserved with care and pride. A few ruins of the earlier walls, which Edward I. erected, and which enclosed a much wider area than is covered by the modern town, still remain; also such vestiges of the once impregnable Castle as have not been removed to make way for the present railway-station. Beyond this, there is little about Berwick to tell of its hoary antiquity and its eventful history. But its red-roofed houses, rising steeply from the left bank of the Tweed, and looking across the tidal river to the villages of Tweedmouth and Spittal, have a picturesqueness of their own, whether they are seen when the lights and shadows of a summer day are playing upon them, or when they are swathed in the white folds of a North Sea _haar_. The Berwick people are shrewd, capable, and kindly, and combine many of the good qualities of their Scotch and Northumbrian neighbours. Their dialect is in some respects akin to the Lowland Scotch, with which it has many words in common; and it has also as a prominent feature that rising intonation, passing sometimes almost into a wail, which one hears all along the eastern Border. But the great outstanding characteristic of Berwick speech is the _burr_ a rough guttural pronunciation of the letter "i." With nothing but the scanty resources of our alphabet to fall back upon, it is quite impossible to represent this peculiarity phonetically, but it was once remarked by a student of Semitic tongues that the sound of the Hebrew letter 'Ayin is as nearly as possible that of the burr, and that, if you want to ascertain the correct Hebrew pronunciation of the name _Ba'al_, all you have got to do is to ask any Alderman of Berwick to say "_Barrel"_[6] [Footnote 6: Some words are very hard to pronounce with a burr in one's throat. Dr. Cairns used to tell that on one occasion, long after he had got well used to the sound of the Berwick speech, he was under the belief that a man with whom he was conversing was talking about a _boy_ until he discovered from the context that his theme was a _brewery_.]