But here we have all the physical sternness of the north, above all of the north-east. The bed of a salmon river or a rocky trout stream whether in Breconshire or Northumberland differs nowise. The swirling pools, the gliding shallows, the angry rock-fretted rapids, the mossy crags and fringing woods or fern-clad banks, are approximately the same on Tyne or Wye, on Dove or Dart, and of a kind that has never yet bred satiety in those whose ways have lain much beside them. The same music, in all its infinite variety of tone and chord, is played by the Coquet, the Monnow, or the Wharfe; the same familiar flies, the drakes and duns, the alders and march-browns, dance to the familiar harmonies, while the white-breasted ousel and his summer visitor the sandpiper are as inevitably in evidence on the Tyne as on the Tamar. It is outside the immediate fringe of such a river that local character and features assert themselves. The South Tyne, from Haltwhistle to Hexham, sweeps bravely down a valley of grass farms, with here and there a village of stern uncompromising stone and slate set on its banks. There is no charm of village architecture in Northumberland, or scarcely any. Nor on the lofty slopes of Tynedale does the rose-embowered, orchard-girdled, thatched-roof cot that Wordsworth saw on the high terraces of the Wye, and sang of, send up its smoke wreaths. The Northumbrian is practical and rectangular in his handling of the landscape. In other words, he is an advanced farmer and generally a big one, only surpassed by the Scotsman in those merits which are fatal to picturesque detail in landscape so far as it can be controlled. The Northumbrian dalesman was a picturesque cattle-lifter, or constant fighter of cattle-lifters, long after the rest of England had settled down to humdrum respectability, and even the Welsh Border had for two centuries buried the hatchet. But when he reformed he did so to some purpose, and has for some generations been very far ahead of the others in eliminating all those luxuriant irregularities of Nature that in the South make for artistic foregrounds. But Northumberland is in many vital respects altogether too much for him. He can trace big rectangles with stone dykes or bridled hedgerows, and lay out well-drained fields in the broader valleys, and erect square, comfortable, unlovely homesteads of whinstone that would stand a siege; but the spirit of the country in its uplifted hills, its wild moors, remains untouched in spite of him. If the modern dwelling by the Tyne, scattered enough in any case, is deplorable from the artist's point of view, the nearer hills to the southward trend upwards gradually in mile-long sweeps to wild and lonely moors, from which come, winding down to the main valley, beautiful glens like those of the two Allens or the Devil's Water, even still more exquisite. It was in the dense woods of Dipton Dene, upon the latter stream, that Queen Margaret, abandoned after the second battle of Hexham