It was an old town then, and belonged to Elizabeth. But it looked much as it does to-day; the gray walls, so recently built; the red roofs, many of them sheltering Berwickians to-day; the church spires, for men worshiped God in those days in churches, and according to the creeds that warred as bitterly as crowns; masts in the offing, whence this last time one might take ship to France, that pleasant smiling land so different from this dour realm. At all these Mary must have looked wistfully and weariedly, as the royal salute was fired for this errant queen. She looked also, over the Border, then becoming a hard-and-fast boundary, and down the long, long road to Fotheringay, and to peace at last and honour, in the Abbey. It is well to stand upon this hill, before you go on to the West and the Border, or on to the North and the gray metropolis, that you may appreciate both the tragedy and the triumph that is Scotland's and was Mary's. The North Sea is turning purple far out on the horizon, and white sea birds are flying across beyond sound. The long level light of the late afternoon is coming up over England. In the backward of the Border a plaintive curlew is crying in the West, as he has cried since the days of Mary, and æons before. _Flodden_ You may go westward from here, by train and coach, and carriage and on foot, to visit this country where every field has been a battlefield, where ruined peel towers finally keep the peace, where castles are in ruins, and a few stately modern homes proclaim the permanence of Scottish nobility; and where there is no bird and no flower unsung by Scottish minstrelsy, or by Scott. Scott is, of course, the poet and prose laureate of the Border. "Marmion" is the lay, almost the guide-book. It should be carried with you, either in memory or in pocket. If the day is not too far spent, the afternoon sun too low, you can make Norham Castle before twilight, even as Marmion made it when he opened the first canon of Scott's poem-- "Day set on Norham's castle steep And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep, And Cheviot's mountains lone; The battled towers, the donjon keep, The loophole grates, where captives weep, The flanking walls that round it sweep, In yellow luster shone."