What we have now said requires the explanation, that at the period of our story, the town of Berwick belonged to the English; and the Mayor, being himself either an Englishman, or connected by strong ties of relationship with the English, had a strong antipathy towards the Scottish Border raiders, whom he denominated as gentlemen-robbers, headed by the noble robber Hume. But, above all, he hated young Patrick--into whose veins, he said, there had been poured the distilled raid-venom and love-poison of all the gentlemen-scaumers that ever infested the Borders. The origin of this hatred had some connection with an affair of the Newmilne, belonging to Berwick; the dam-dike of which, Patrick alleged, prevented the salmon from getting up the river, and hence destroyed all his angling sport, as well as that of all the noblemen and gentlemen that resorted to the river for the purpose of practising the "gentle art." He had therefore threatened to pull it down, to let up the fish; and sounded his threat in the ears of the indignant Mayor, in terms that were, peradventure, made stronger and bitterer by the thought that dikes and walls were his greatest bane upon earth: by the walls of Berwick the Mayor kept from his arms the fair Isabella, and by the dam-dike of Newmilne the same Mayor deprived him of the pleasure of angling. Was such power on the part of a Mayor to be borne by the high-spirited youth who had been trained to look upon mason-work as a mere stimulant to love or war--a thing that raised the value of what it enclosed by the opposition it offered to the young blood that raged for entrance? The youth thought not. He vowed that he would neither lose his Isabella nor his salmon; and, as fate would have it, the old Mayor had heard the vow, and vowed also that young Patrick should lose both. Having fished one day to no purpose, in consequence of the obstruction of "that most accursed of all dam-dikes, the Newmilne dike," as Patrick styled it, he threw down his rod, and lay down upon the bank of the river, to wait the hour when the moon should summon and lighten him to the loop-hole in the other of his hated obstructions, the walls of Berwick--where that evening he expected to meet his beloved Isabella, and commune with her in the eloquent language of their mutual passion. The bright luminary burst in the midst of his reveries from behind an autumn cloud, and flashed a long silver beam upon the rolling waters. He started to his feet. "It is beyond my time," he said, self-accusingly. "My Isabella is on Berwick Wall, and I am still lingering here by the banks of the river, three miles from where my love and honour require me to be. The loiterer in love is a laggard in war; and shame on the Hume who is either!" In a short time the young Hume was standing beneath a buttress of the old walls of the town, looking earnestly through a small opening, in which he expected to see the face of the fair daughter of the Mayor.