which I had been living all life-long till now, on the top of the hill. I had proof, however, at our first English stage, that such was actually the case. "Is all right?" asked the coachman, of a tall, lanky Northumbrian, who had busied himself in changing the horses. "Yez, all roit," was the reply; "roit as the Church of England." I was, it was evident, on Presbyterian ground no longer.
We passed, as the country began to open, a spot marked by two of the crossed swords of our more elaborate maps: they lie thick on both sides the Border, to indicate where the old battle-fields were stricken; and the crossed swords of this especial locality are celebrated in chronicle and song. A rude, straggling village runs for some one or two hundred yards along both sides of the road. On the left there is a group of tall trees, elevated on a ridge, which they conceal; and a bare, undulating, somewhat wild country, spreads around. All is quiet and solitary; and no scathe on the landscape corresponds with the crossed swords on the map. There were a few children at play, as we passed, in front of one of the cottages, and two old men sauntering along the road. And such now is Otterburn,—a name I had never associated before, save with the two noble ditties of Chevy Chase, the magnificent narrative of Froissart, and the common subject of both ballads and narrative, however various their descriptions of it,—that one stern night's slaughter, four hundred years ago,
"When the dead Douglas won the field."
It was well for the poor victors they had a Froissart to celebrate them. For though it was the Scotch who gained the battle, it was the English who had the writing of the songs, and had not the victors found so impartial a chronicler in the generous Frenchman, the two songs, each a model in its own
