The Wall was, in truth, a very palpable thing, stretching from the Solway to the North Sea at the Tyne, with ample width for the constant patrol, with lookout towers at regular and frequent intervals, with soldiers gathered from every corner of the Empire, often the spawn of it, and with much traffic and with even permanent villas built the secure side of the barrier. If you meet Puck on Pook's hill, he will tell you all about it. Our fast express moves swiftly northward, through the littoral of Northumberland, as the ship bearing Sister Clare moved through the sea-- "And now the vessel skirts the strand Of mountainous Northumberland; Towns, towers, and hills successive rise, And catch the nun's delighted eyes." _Berwick_ The voyager enters Berwick with a curious feeling. It is because of the voyagers who have preceded him that this town is singular among all the towns of the Empire. It is of the Empire, it is of Britain; but battled round about, and battled for as it has been since ambitious time began, it is of neither England nor Scotland. "Our town of Berwick-upon-Tweed," as the phrase still runs in the acts of Parliament, and in the royal proclamations; not England's, not Scotland's. Our town, the King's town. For it is an independent borough (1551) since the men who fared before us could not determine which should possess it, and so our very own time records that history in an actual fact. I do not suppose the present serious-looking, trades-minded people of the city, with their dash of fair Danish, remember their singular situation day by day. The tumult and the shouting have died which made "the Border" the most embattled place in the empire, and Berwick-upon-Tweed the shuttlecock in this international game of badminton. It is a dual town at the best. But what has it not witnessed, what refuge, what pawn, has it not been, this capital of the Debatable Land, this Key of the Border. The Tweed is here spanned by the Royal Border Bridge, opened in 1850, and called "the last Act of Union." But there is another bridge, a Roman bridge of many spans, antique looking as the Roman-Moorish-Spanish bridge at Cordova, and as antique as 1609, an Act of Union following swiftly on the footsteps of King James VI--who joyously paused here to fire a salute to himself, on his way to the imperial throne. The walls of Berwick, dismantled in 1820 and become a promenade for peaceful townsfolk and curious sightseers, date no farther back than Elizabeth's time. But she had sore need of them; for this "our town," was the refuge for her harriers on retaliatory Border raids, particularly that most terrible Monday-to-Saturday foray of 1570, that answer to an attempt to reassert the rights of Mary, when fifty castles and peels and three hundred villages were laid waste in order that Scotland might know that Elizabeth was king.