[Illustration: THE GLEN AT COUPLAND.] The Till not only augments the waters, but adds to the beauties, of the Tweed. "The sullen Till," Scott calls it in his poetry; but here he is tuning his harp to a minor key to sing the disaster at Flodden; and he can mean no more by the uncomplimentary expression than when in his prose he speaks of it as deep and slow. A very leisurely water it certainly is, and the country through which it flows--past Ewart Newtown, where it is joined by the Glen, which rises on the slopes of the Cheviots as Bowmont Water, and passes through scenery of which that at Coupland may be taken as typical--is not on the whole interesting. But the epithet is less than just if applied to its mouth and the reaches immediately below, for here it flows through a deep, winding, and gloriously wooded glen. On the peninsula where the streams meet and blend, stands a fragment of what was once "a chapel fair," dedicated to St. Cuthbert; for when the roving saint had tired of Melrose and induced his custodians to launch him upon the Tweed in a stone coffin, this "ponderous bark for river-tides" glided "light as gossamer" until it landed here. The coffin used to be shown in two pieces beside the ruin (it was broken by the saint's guardian spirits, to save it from being degraded to an ignoble use); and Sir Walter, who would appear to have seen it, says that it was finely shaped, and of such proportions that with very little assistance it might have floated. To "Tillmouth cell" it was that Clare was conveyed by the pious monk when some "base marauder's lance" had at once rid her of her persecutor and avenged the betrayal of Constance; and here she spent the night in prayer. And to Tillmouth also it was that Friar John was attached, that "blithesome brother at the can" who in evil hour "crossed the Tweed to teach Dame Alison her creed," and being interrupted in the exposition by her churl of a husband, and being on principle an enemy to strife, incontinently fled "sans frock and hood." A boon companion the worthy John must have been, but not a safe guide for Marmion or another, since-- "When our John hath quaffed his ale, As little as the wind that blows And warms itself against his nose, Kens he, or cares, which way he goes."