hatred which existed between the two nations.  The Scots held their own wonderfully well, considering their greatly inferior numbers and the general poverty of their country.  The union, after all, was brought about not by conquest but by a Scotch king going to London to assume the crown of the two kingdoms.  The famous old town of Berwick-on-Tweed bore the brunt of the incursions from both sides on the eastern coast, as did Carlisle on the west.  The town of Dunbar, situated on the coast about midway between Edinburgh and Berwick, was of great importance in border history.  It had an extensive and strongly fortified castle, situated on the margin of a cliff overhanging the ocean, and which was for a time the residence of Queen Mary after her marriage with Darnley.  Nothing now remains of this great structure save a few crumbling walls of red sandstone, which are carefully propped up and kept in the best possible repair by the citizens, who have at last come to realize the cash value of such a ruin.  If such a realization had only come a hundred years ago, a great service would have been done the historian and the antiquarian.  But this is no less true of a thousand other towns than of Dunbar.  No quainter edifice did we see in all Britain than Dunbar’s Fifteenth Century town hall.  It seemed more characteristic of an old German town than of Scotland.  This odd old building is still the seat of the city government.

[Illustration:  Town house, Dunbar, Scotland.]

Our route from Dunbar ran for a long way between the hills of Lammermoor and the ocean and abounded in delightful and striking scenery.  We were forcibly reminded of Scott’s mournful story, “The Bride of Lammermoor,” as we passed among the familiar scenes mentioned in the book, and it was the influence of this romantic tale that led us from the main road into narrow byways and sleepy little coast towns innocent of modern progress and undisturbed by the rattle of railways trains.  No great distance from Berwick and directly on the ocean stands Fast Castle, said to be the prototype of the Wolf’s Crag of “Lammermoor.”  This wild story had always interested me in my boyhood days and for years I had dreamed of the possibility of some time seeing the supposed retreat of the melancholy Master of Ravenswood.  We had great difficulty in locating the castle, none of the people seeming to know anything about it, and we wandered many miles among the hills through narrow, unmarked byways, with little idea of where we were really going.  At last, after dint of inquiry, we came upon a group of houses which we were informed were the headquarters of a large farm of about two thousand acres, and practically all the people who worked on the farm lived, with their families, in these houses.  The superintendent knew of Fast Castle, which he said was in a lonely and inaccessible spot, situated on a high, broken headland overlooking the ocean.  It was two or three miles distant and the road would hardly admit