to be subdued by human means or motives.  To them, naturally, the half century of this hissing and seething, insurrection and repression, is longer than the five hundred years and more it took to fuse into one the nationalities of England and Wales.  What a point of space is a century midway between the ninth and nineteenth!  Few are long-sighted enough in historic vision to touch that point with a cambric needle.  It may seem unfeeling to say it or think it; still it is as true as the plainest history of the last millenium.  There is a patriotism that looks at the future through a gimlet hole, and sees in it but a single star.  That patriotism is a natural, and most popular sentiment.  It was strong in the Welshman’s breast a thousand years ago, and in the Scotsman’s half that distance back in the past.  But it is a patriotism that has its day and its rule; then both its eyes are opened, and it looks upon the firmament of the future broadside on, and sees a constellation where it once saw and half worshipped a solitary star.  Better to be the part of a great WHOLE than the whole of a little nothing.

These continental Border-lands may see the face of their future history in the mirror of England’s annals.  They are quaking now with the impetuous emotions of local nationality.  They are blackened and scarred in the contest for the Welsh and Scotch independence of centuries agone.  But over those boundary wastes the grass shall yet grow soft, fair and green, and there, too, the white lambs shall lie in the sun.

My walk lay over the most inhospitable and unpeopled section I ever saw.  Calling at a station on the railway that passes through it, I was told by the master that the nearest church or chapel was sixteen miles in one direction, and over twenty in another.  It is doubtful if so large a churchless space could be found in Iowa or even Kansas.  I was glad to reach Hawick, a good, solid town but a little way inside of the Scottish border, where I spent the sabbath and the following Monday.  This was a rallying and sallying point in the old Border Wars, and was inundated two or three times by the flux and reflux of this conflict, having been burnt twice, and put under the ordeal of other calamities brought upon it when free-booting was both the business, occupation and pastime of knighted chieftains and their clansmen.  It is now a thrifty, manufacturing town, lying in the trough of the sea, or of the lofty hills that resemble waves hardened to earth in their crests.  Just opposite the Temperance Inn in which I had my quarters, was the Tower Hotel, once a palatial mansion of the Buccleuchs.  There the Duchess of Monmouth used to hold her drawing-rooms in an apartment which many a New England journeyman mechanic would hardly think ample and comfortable enough for his parlor.  There is a curious conical mound in the town, called the Moat-hill, which looks like a great, green carbuncle.  It is thought by some to be a Druidical monument,