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61 
THE HISTORY AND BALLADS OF THE BORDER. 
By R. A. ALLISON. 
(Read at Longtown.) 
When you look northward from your little town, or the high 
ground in its vicinity, your eye catches, as the most prominent 
object in the landscape, the westernmost summits of the gently 
rounded heights of that range of hill country, which sweeps across 
from the eastern coast, right away to, and along the shores of the 
Solway Frith. These hills constitute in the main what we call the 
district of the Border—a district which recalls to our minds by its 
very name, some of the most stirring scenes in our national and 
local history. The Border land—the land of Tweed and Teviot— 
of Liddell and Annan, and Esk and Kirtle—what memories are 
not connected with every one of its hills and dales and streams? 
There every field has its battle, and every rivulet its song, and how 
we still love to visit its old towers and keeps, and dream of the 
romance and chivalry of the past! They speak to us of a grandly 
exciting time, when the chieftain’s foot was often in the stirrup, and 
the midnight foray was man’s ordinary pastime. Their very names 
are instinct with a charm and a poetry, which can never be dis- 
sociated from them; and of no man in the world, I suppose, than 
the Borderer, are Goldsmith’s lines more true, however far he may 
have travelled in search of that wealth which Scotchmen proverbi- 
j ally do not despise. Still he says— 
Where’er I roam, whatever lands I see, 
My heart untravelled, fondly turns to thee. 
The names of his native hills and dales are often on his tongue, 
