Down in a ditch of the fortifications a soldier in his shirt sleeves, his braces dangling about his legs, is tending early peas with all the tenderness of a mother for an invalid child; for, look you, early peas in these latitudes have a hard fight for it; and the fight of those vegetables for existence against the nipping blasts that sweep from off the North Sea is the only sign of warfare the place has to show. Taken as a whole, and looked at whichever way you will, the “defences” of Berwick-upon-Tweed show a trustfulness in Providence and in the astounding luck of the British Empire which argues much for the piety or the folly of our rulers. And so, with the varied reflections these things call forth, let us away up the High Street, and, passing under the archway of the Scotch Gate, spanning its northern extremity, leave Berwick on the way to Scotland. XXX “SEEING Scotland, Madam,” said Dr. Johnson, in answer to Mrs. Thrale’s expressed wish to visit that country, “is only seeing a worse England. It is seeing the flower gradually fade away to the naked stalk.” This bitter saying of the Doctor’s comes vividly to mind when leaving Berwick on the way to Edinburgh. Passing the outskirts of the town at a point marked on the Ordnance map with the unexplained name of “Conundrum,” the country grows bare and treeless on approaching the sea, and at Lamberton Toll, three miles north, where “Berwick Bounds” are reached and Scotland entered, the scene is desolate in the extreme. The cottage to the left of the road at this point, formerly the toll-house of the turnpike-gate that stood here, is a famous place, rivalling Gretna Green for the runaway matches, legalised at the gate until 1856, when changes in the law rendered a part of the once-familiar notice in the window out-of-date. It ran, “Ginger-beer sold here, and marriages performed on the most reasonable terms”; an announcement which for combination of the trivial and the tremendous it would be difficult to beat. Geographically in Scotland when across the Tweed, we are not politically in that country until past this cottage. Then indeed we are, in many ways, in a foreign country. [Picture: Lamberton Toll]