For the remaining ten or twelve miles the course is one of utter solitude and of growing wildness--not even a shepherd's hut in sight, and no tree, except here and there a stunted hawthorn or a lonely rowan; the braes less verdant, and more given to yielding screes; no sound to be heard but the irritating squeal of the stone-chipper, the low, long-drawn whistle of the "whaup," or the pleading cry of the peewit. Of animated nature no other sign meets the eye save little groups of sheep clinging to the braes--the fierce-looking black-faced variety it may be, or the half-breeds with their still more ferocious-looking streaked visages, or the meeker "cheeviots." So the slow ascent continues until at last Tweedshaws, the solitary farmhouse, is reached, and then, leaving the road a little way up Flocker Hill, you stand at last at Tweedswell, the putative source of the stream. Looking around, you see on every hand huge hills rising in the distance, and making between them a vast circle--Black Dod, and Clyde Law, near which the great western stream rises, and Moll's Cleuch Dod, and Lochraig, and many another, while just behind Flocker Hill, Hart Fell rears its giant form. When Merlin Wylt roamed the wilds of Tweeddale a mighty forest waved over them; now the evidence of their former glory of rowan and birch and hazel must be looked for in the peaty soil which stains the head-streams as they furrow their way down the braes. Later in the year these hills, at present so swart and void, will be brightened with scatterings of purple; and then, under a sunnier sky, their plight will seem less blank and savage. But now they show an aspect stark and grim; for the time of the broom is not yet, and to-day the sun is sulking behind the murk, and their gusty tops are all asmoke. W. W. HUTCHINGS. [Illustration: HART FELL.] [Illustration: AMONG THE FELLS.] THE COQUET. The Fisherman's River--"Awa' to the Border"--Peat-Hags--Eel-Fishing--Alwinton and Harbottle--The Village of Rothbury--Brinkburn Priory--Weldon Bridge and Felton--Warkworth Hermitage and Castle--The Town of Amble--Coquet Isle. "There's a gentleman that will tell ye that just when I had ga'en up to Lourie Lowther's, and had bidden the drinking of twa cheerers, and gotten just in again upon the moss, and was whigging cannily awa' hame, twa land-loupers jumpit out of a peat-hag on me or I was thinking, and got me down, and knevelled me sair eneuch, or I could gar my whip walk about their lugs; and troth, Gudewife, if this honest gentleman hadna come up, I would have gotten mair licks than I like, and lost mair siller than I could weel spare; so ye maun be thankful to him for it under God." So, with all the generations of Pepper and Mustard frisking about him, did honest Dandie Dinmont explain to his wife how he came by a battered face and a wounded head. [Illustration: _Walker & Boutall sc._ THE COURSE OF THE COQUET.]