It grew very cold as we neared Carlisle. Every one I saw was buttoned-up and great-coated, and I was sensible of as great a change in humanity as in nature. I had missed all the way from Kendal the workingman’s paper cap, the distinctive badge of labor in those days. If there were workingmen 90 around Carlisle they did not wear it. All the men I saw wore large caps of heavy blue flannel, sometimes bordered with red—an ugly head-gear, but apparently just the thing wanted by the big, bony men who had adopted it. I saw a crowd of them at Gretna Green, where a woman got into the train, and rode with me as far as Ecclefechan. She was not a pleasant woman, but I asked her about this big blue cap, and with a look of contempt for my ignorance, she answered, “They are just the lad’s bonnets. Every one wears them. Where do you come from?”
“London,” I replied with an “air.”
“Ay, I thought so. You’re a queer one, not to know a blue bonnet, when you see it.”
Then I had the clue to a dashing, stirring song which had always puzzled me a little, “All the Blue Bonnets are over the Border.” It meant, that these blue-bonneted giants, were over the English border, raiding and harrying the shepherds and farmers of the northern counties. And I smiled to myself, as I remembered the kind of welcome always waiting for them, whenever the slogan passed from fell to fell:
“Cumberland hot,
Westmoreland hot,
Prod the Scot!
For all the blue bonnets are over the Border!”