It is a common saying among old men, with probably a half truth in it, that the King's writ within their memory did not run in Bewcastle. And at Carlisle, too, comes in the Petteril, which has run northward from near Penrith through the vanished forest of Inglewood, a parallel course to the Eden and quite near to it. Here the Calder arrives almost at the same moment from the far back of Skiddaw Forest, [Illustration: THE EDEN, NEAR LAZONBY, CUMBERLAND] [Illustration] watering in its infancy the hill village of Caldbeck, which John Peel has made famous, and murmuring by the churchyard where that hero lies beneath a tombstone decorated with the emblems of the chase. The Eden then, it will have been gathered, is a great and important river, as our English standards go, watering a broad region of singular beauty and romantic interest, and drawing tribute both from the Lake country, the Pennines, and the lower Cheviots. The city of Carlisle, which rises on its sandstone ridge above the Eden, steeped in the stirring deeds of centuries, must for that very reason be passed lightly by. The river, however, it should be noted, had its share in the Roman wall of Hadrian, which crossed it here upon a bridge and finished at Stanwix, just below Carlisle, where stood the Roman station of Lugubalium. Roman Carlisle with its camps, roads, and garrisons, was of extreme importance, but the later Carlisle, from the time when it ceased to be Scottish ground in the thirteenth century till the rebellion of 1745, when so many things happened here, is altogether too racy and stirring a subject to mock at with a page or paragraph. In connection, however, with this last leisurely progress of the Eden to the Solway estuary, it is worthy of note that the seven or eight miles of country through which it winds, the corner lying between Carlisle and Scotland, that is to say, is a dead level; a melancholy expanse of reclaimed moss, as the prevalent fir-woods significantly proclaim, while peat hags even yet show here and there between the grey fallows and pale pastures. It was along here, too, just to the east of the Eden, that runaway couples in former days galloped hot foot before their pursuers to Gretna Green, which lies at the farther end of it. But as a matter of fact this belt of level country, over which the castle walls of Carlisle look so proudly to the Scottish hills across the Solway, strikes a perfect note in this romantic and significant Border topography. The Eden could not possibly contrive a more harmonious finish than in this complete change of scene and demeanour, this silent progress through unadorned, infertile, almost uncared-for looking levels, that for this very reason seem to keep a firmer hold of the grim spirit of the past; a tramping ground of hostile armies, a cockpit of lawless clan warfare, a treacherous galloping ground of the moss-trooper with the rope dangling for him on Carlisle Castle, each in their day and generation. This even