In Arthuret churchyard there is shown a broken cross, said to mark the grave of Archie Armstrong, the famous Court fool of James the First and Charles the First. James brought him south, from the Border, where he had early distinguished himself as a sheepstealer in Eskdale; and his impudence and invincible effrontery brought him a long period of success at Court. But at last he overreached himself, in his enmity to Archbishop Laud. On one occasion, saying grace at Whitehall, he exclaimed, “Great praise to God and little laud to the Devil,” and all the Court sniggered; but when, in 1637, he met Laud at a time when the Scots were rising against the Archbishop’s attempts at dictation in religious matters, and asked, “Wha’s fool the noo?” the jester’s licence had grown beyond endurance, and he was dismissed. He lived many years longer, and earned the reputation of an extremely usurious lender of money, to whom no sharp practices came amiss. The cross shown as marking his resting-place is really a portion of an ancient Scandinavian monument. [Sidenote: _SIR JAMES GRAHAM_] Another character, very notorious in his day, lies in the churchyard: Sir James Graham of Netherby, who was Home Secretary in 1844, when the correspondence of Mazzini and other political refugees was opened at the General Post Office by his direction, and read. Graham received his orders from the Earl of Aberdeen, Minister for Foreign Affairs, but it was Graham himself upon whom the whole of the public obloquy fell, and he remarked, in the true spirit of prophecy, that all else he had done would be forgotten, and he would be remembered only by this wretched incident. It surely is a pitiful thing and a real tragedy of the public service that an honourable gentleman who in private life would have scorned to do anything mean should go down in history as the man who violated the sanctity of private correspondence. [Illustration: ARTHURET CHURCH.] There are no architectural graces in Longtown. Each house is like its fellow and every street resembles every other street. How then do the strayed revellers, returning home “fou,” find the way to their especial domiciles? An attempt to subdue the stark angularity of Longtown, though not to give its streets variety, is seen in the somewhat recent planting of the roads with trees. Many people suppose the river Esk at Longtown to be the division between England and Scotland. The supposition is reasonable enough, for the actual divisor, the Sark, four miles further on, approaching Springfield, is a very insignificant stream in appearance. The political and the social significances of it were, however, of very serious import indeed. Solway Moss is passed on the way. Turner has made it the subject of one of the finest plates in his _Liber Studiorum_, and has imported into the view some mountains that are not there, together with some weather which, fortunately for the present writer, was equally absent when he passed this way.