If, like the salmon, we prefer the North to the South Tyne, it is after all but a selection between good things; for the valley of the former, winding for 30 miles to its source just over the Scottish frontier, is, together with its tributary the Rede, the absolute embodiment, the quintessence, not merely of Border and Cheviot scenery, but of that stirring past which gives the Anglo-Scottish Border an atmosphere all its own. The Welsh Marches are instinct with the same spirit. The difference in their detail for those to whom both have made their appeal furnish an interesting and instructive contrast with which we have no business here. But rivers after all play such a conspicuous and romantic part in both. The streams of Wye and Dee, of Usk, Severn, and Towy on the one hand, of Tyne and Coquet and Till and Tweed on the other, blend their music with the harp of the bard or the voice of the minstrel, and their names bite deep into every page of the moving chronicle. The one has upon the whole a note of a pathos, something of the wail of a conquered race, not as the Saxon was conquered, but of a small people contending long and heroically against hopeless odds to a climax that in the long run brought little to regret. The other, robust and racy of retrospect with the consciousness of equal struggle. The one Celtic to the core, clad in a tongue unknown to the conquerors, who in their turn celebrated, so far as I know, no single triumph in ode or ballad, and accompanied two centuries of mortal strife with no single verse. In the other we have two communities, bone of the same bone, flesh of the same flesh, furnished with almost the same racy variety of the same rich tongue, who flung ballads across the Border as they shot arrows or crossed spears. But above all, they left off quits, and amid a hundred fights have always a Flodden for a Bannockburn, and a Homildon Hill for an Otterburn. "I never hear," wrote Sir Philip Sidney, "the old song of Percy and Douglas that I find not my heart more moved than by a trumpet." One luminous and sufficiently accurate fact may be remembered in this connection, namely, that the end of one long struggle was the beginning of the other; that the same iron hand which, speaking broadly, crushed the last gleam of Welsh independence, permanently alienated by efforts of similar intent the hitherto not unfriendly northern kingdom. For till the Scottish wars of Edward the First and the days of Bruce and Wallace, Border feuds in the full meaning of the term had little significance. The very Border line upon the North Tyne and Rede was vague. Scotland and England fought occasionally and vigorously, but there was no rancour nor unfriendliness when the game was over. Redesdale and Liddesdale cut each other's throats and lifted each other's cattle no doubt, as did other dales, promiscuously, but not as Scot and Southern and as bitter hereditary foes.