She put one little hand on the tricycle wheel, and looked into my face with a pair of eyes as blue and liquid as the sea out yonder.
“We tie our chins up,” she said, “to keep the sun off.”
“Oh-h-h!” I said; “and to save your beauty.”
She nodded, and I rode on.
But in speaking of my adventure with the thistle lassies to a man in Berwick—“Yes,” he said, “and those girls on a Sunday come out dressed like ladies in silks and satins.”
I remember that our first blink o’ bonnie Scotland was from the hill above Tweedmouth. And yonder below us lay Berwick, with its tall, tapering spires and vermilion-roofed houses. Away to the left, far as eye could reach, sleeping in the sunlight, was the broad and smiling valley of the Tweed. The sea to the right was bright blue in some places, and a slaty grey where cloud shadows fell. It was dotted with many a white sail, with here and there a steamboat, with a wreath of dark smoke, fathoms long, trailing behind it.
Berwick-on-Tweed, I have been told more than once, belongs neither to Scotland nor to England. It is neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring. It is a county by itself. My royal mistress ought therefore to be called Queen of Great Britain, Berwick, and Ireland. But I will have it thus: Berwick is part and parcel of Scotland. Tell me not of English laws being in force in the pretty town; I maintain that the silvery Tweed is the natural dividing line ’twixt England and the land of mountain and flood.