But first a word as to country and people. From Berwick to the Solway--the extreme points of the dividing line between North and South Britain--is but seventy miles in a crow’s flight. But trace its windings, and you measure one hundred and ten. Over more than half of this space the division is arbitrary. It happed where the opposing forces balanced. The Scot pushed his way a little farther south here, was pushed back a little farther north there; and commissioners and treaties indelibly marked the spots. The conflict lasted over three centuries, and must obviously be fiercest on the line where the kingdoms met. If it stiffened, yet warped, the Scots’ character, and prevented the growth of commerce and tilth and comfort in Scotland proper, what must have been its effect on the Scots Borderer, ever in the hottest of the furnace? The weaker, poorer, smaller kingdom felt the struggle far more than England, yet the English were worse troubled than the Scots Borders: being the richer, they were the more liable to incursion; their dalesmen were not greatly different from other Englishmen; they were kept in hand by a strong central authority; they had thriving towns and a certain standard of wealth and comfort. Now, the Scots clansmen developed unchecked; so it is mainly from them that we take our ideas of Border life. The Border country is a pleasant pastoral land, with soft, rounded hills, and streams innumerable, and secluded valleys, where the ruins of old peels or feudal castles intimate a troubled past. That past, however, has left a precious legacy to letters, for the Border ballads are of the finest of the wheat. They preserve, as only literature can, the joys and sorrows, the aspirations, hopes and fears, and beliefs of other days and vanished lives. They are voices from the darkness, yet we oft feel: He had himself laid hand on sword He who this rime did write!