At the foot of the long street of Rothbury, and just on the lower outskirt of the village, is the Thrum Mill, the name of which is explained by the fact that the river here strains through a narrow chasm, or thrum, in a piled-up bed of freestone rock. The mill is an object of the conventionally picturesque description, with a moss-grown waterwheel, and with a tumbling torrent for foreground. A bridge here crosses the Coquet, and to the left, half-way up the steep side of a heathery hill, rises the mixed Gothic and Elizabethan mansion of Lord Armstrong. The site has clearly been chosen for the wildness of its surroundings, for whatever changes may be wrought by cultivation, and however the growth of plantations may soften the harsh brown and softer purple of the heather, untamed Nature will still assert itself here, like Hereward's wife at Ely, as "captive but unconquered." At Cragside there is one of the noblest of English picture galleries, the contents of which have been brought together by an exceedingly catholic taste, and by a liberality of expenditure only possible to "wealthy men who care not how they give." Here are Linnell's "Thunderstorm in Autumn," Millais' "Chill October," David Cox's "Ulverstone Sands," Leslie's "Cowslip Gatherers," Wilkie's "Rabbit on the Wall," Rossetti's "Margaret and her Jewels," and some of the finest works of Turner, Landseer, Phillip, Müller, and, coming down to living artists, Sir Frederick Leighton. [Illustration: AT FELTON.] From Rothbury the Coquet takes a long sweep through the fields and then plunges into the woods of Brinkburn. There are here, one reads, great and dangerous holes in the river bed; but so there are at many places on the Coquet, and not at Brinkburn more remarkably or permanently than elsewhere. Such holes are made by the swirling water of the floods, and may change their situation with every spate. Their more particular association with Brinkburn may arise from the fact that the bells of the priory are believed to have been cast into a hole in the river, from which whosoever recovers them, says the tradition, will come into possession of treasures galore. Brinkburn was one of the earliest religious settlements on the disturbed and lawless English side of the Border. Exceedingly courageous must have been those monks who decided to accept the rough chances of life at Brinkburn Priory. They had the protection of the deep woods, indeed. Even now one may pass by Brinkburn without suspecting what rich memorials of a past age and a venerable faith are hid within its leafy coverts. It is not merely embosomed, but buried, in trees. So, too, it must have been when the monks were here, for the story goes that a party of marauding Scots had already passed the priory, and was well on its way toward places under less saintly protection, when the monks too soon set the bells a-ringing for joy at its departure, with the evil result of revealing