we hear the patriot as well as the poet. Yet it is the truth that the Scots at Flodden fought no less valiantly than their ancestors had done at Bannockburn. But their king, though a gallant soldier, as in many respects he was a wise statesman, and, like most of his house, an accomplished man, was as bad a general as ever led brave men to destruction; while Surrey could not only head a charge, but play a cunning and wary game. It was not the first time the men had met. Ten years before, the English noble had handed to the Scottish king his bride, Margaret Tudor--then, a girl of fourteen, her mind teeming with dreams of imminent happiness; now, a sad and lonely woman, awaiting tidings of the strife betwixt her husband and her brother which all her tears and caresses had been impotent to avert. At Coldstream, a couple of miles or so farther up the Tweed, pleasantly girdled with trees, we are still in the thick of military memories. Not far from where Smeaton's bridge gives a choice view both up and down stream is the first ford of any importance above Berwick. Here Edward I. crossed in 1296; here also Leslie and his Covenanters crossed in 1640 on their way south. At Coldstream, too, rather more than twenty years afterwards, the general who could make a king and hold his tongue disbanded his regiment as soldiers of the Commonwealth and re-embodied it as the Coldstream Guards before setting forth to undo the work in which the Covenanters had borne so large a share. It was by this ford, again, that Marmion, in his haste not to miss the fighting, made his perilous passage across the stream, having spent the night at Lennel's Convent, of which "one frail arch" is all that is left. [Illustration: COLDSTREAM BRIDGE, FROM UP-STREAM.] A little above the spot "where to the Tweed Leat's eddies creep," on the southern bank, is a fragment of Wark Castle. According to Leland, it was "causid to be made" by Henry II. It twice repulsed attack at the hands of David I.; and when on the second occasion he had reduced it by blockade, he thought it well "to ding it doon." But it was rebuilt by Henry, and gave the Scots much further trouble before its final demolition--probably just after the union of the Crowns, when so many Border strongholds were dismantled. When, about the middle of the fourteenth century, David Bruce laid siege to it, the governor himself, Sir William Montague, mounted on a "wight" steed, penetrated the investing lines one dark and stormy night, and carried word to the king, Edward III., of what was happening at Wark, and so the siege was raised. The castle had been Edward's wedding-gift to the Earl of Salisbury, and the countess was here when he relieved it. She was naturally grateful, and her liege complacent; and the gossips say that in this wise began the romance of which one incident was the establishment of the Order of the Garter. The king was certainly in a perilous situation, for had he not just rescued the lady from one?