"The bents" are the grass-covered sandhills which time and the winds have piled up between the ancient landmarks and the present limits of the tide. They rise to very considerable heights, and stretch, in great undulations, along many a mile of shore. The Coquet flows down between them to a wide waste of sand when the sea is out, and one may trace its waters, should they be discoloured by flood, on either side of the Coquet Island, which the river must have worn from the mainland very long ago. The island is a low, level strip, containing some sixteen acres of ground. It has a peculiar history of its own. There was a monastery upon it in the seventh century, and here the Abbess of Whitby is said to have met St. Cuthbert, who, for this occasion, had overcome his generally invincible dislike to women. St. Cuthbert's own island is in sight from the Coquet, and if the Farnes were not in the way one's range of vision might extend to Lindisfarne. In later times than those in which Cuthbert taught religion to a rude people the hermit of Warkworth had a rival hermit in the recluse of Coquet Isle; a far more dismal place to reside in, for all around it rage the terrible winter storms of the North Sea. Persons interested in the art of "smashing" may be interested to hear that Coquet Island was resorted to by the makers of false coins--"hard hedds" they were called in those days--so early as 1567. The place was taken by the Scots during the Civil Wars, and there its history ends, except so far as it is continued by shipwreck and disaster at sea. On Coquet Island a lighthouse now stands, tall and white, so that its walls may be seen far away over the sea in the daytime, and its lamps for many a rood at night. Gulls and terns and puffins and guillemots play around it and make their nests amid its sandy turf; and there comes "the dunter," as the fishermen call it, the porpoise as it is called in more ordinary speech, to devour the bull trout as it is making towards the comparative safety of the Coquet waters. All this may be changed a few years hence, for Amble is developing its trade, and hereafter masts of assembled shipping, and a black prospect of "coal-shoots," may be the characteristic features of Coquet mouth. AARON WATSON. [Illustration: KEILDER MOORS (WITH PEEL FELL TO THE RIGHT).] THE TYNE. CHAPTER I. THE NORTH TYNE. Peel Fell--Deadwater Bog--Keilder Castle and the Keilder Moors--The Border Peel--Border Feuds and Friendships--The Charltons--Bellingham--The Reed--Tyne Salmon--The Village of Wark--Chipchase Castle--Haughton Castle and the Swinburnes--Chollerford and the Roman Wall--The Meeting of the Waters.