Not a great way from the first of the bends in which the stream indulges, and within sight of the towers of Longridge, the Whiteadder from the Lammermoors, reinforced by the Blackadder, renders up its tribute. Two miles above this point the river is crossed by the Union Suspension Bridge, which, built by Sir S. Brown in 1820, is said to have been the first structure of the kind erected in these islands, while as bridges go along the Tweed it is also quite an antiquity; for, until the beginning of the century, there was only one between Peebles and Berwick, a space of more than sixty miles. Now they are many, yet there has been little sacrifice of beauty to utility, for, as a rule, when not picturesque, they are at least neat and modest. Hereabouts the valley is fairly broad, the banks rising on either hand into a long succession of rolling meadows green with herbage, or of furrowed fields red with tilth, in the prime of summer smothered with tender shoots of corn all aglow with the bright yellow blooms of the runch--to the wayfarer a flower, to the husbandman a weed. So curve to curve succeeds until Norham Castle comes in sight, standing on a lofty cliff of red freestone which rises almost sheer from the water on the southern bank, and disdainfully rearing itself high above the trees that have presumed to grow up around it. [Illustration: TILLMOUTH HOUSE, FROM THE BANKS OF THE TILL.] When this ancient little village first had a stronghold no one seems to know. As early as 1121 a fortress was built here by Bishop Flambard, of Durham; but it was not the first to occupy the site. After the death of "this plunderer of the rich, this exterminator of the poor," the castle was so roughly handled by David I. that in 1164 we find another Bishop of Durham, Hugh Pudsey, virtually rebuilding it, and adding a massive keep. But warrior-priests were not much to the mind of the king who suggested the assassination of Thomas à Becket, and so, some ten years after he had rebuilt it, the bishop was prevailed upon to pass it on to William de Neville; and from this time onwards it appears to have been treated as a royal fortress. Thus it came about that more than once it was the scene of conference between William the Lion and the English King whose only association with the noble beast was through his brother. And here also came Edward I., to decide between the thirteen claimants to the crown of Alexander III., and to do a little business on his own account as well. A memoir of the Dacres on its condition early in the sixteenth century speaks of the keep as impregnable; but it was nothing of the kind. Like all these Border strengths, it was always being taken and retaken; and only a few years before this memoir was written, James IV., then on his way to Flodden, had brought up Mons Meg against it, and with the "auld murderess's" help had possessed himself of it. Pudsey's massive keep still remains, though in a greatly shattered state, and shorn of its