orders were to communicate, lighted up his own
beacon. The signal was immediately repeated through all the valleys on the
English Border. If the beacon at Saint Abb's Head had been fired, the alarm
would have run northward, and roused all Scotland. But the watch at this
important point judiciously considered, that if there had been an actual or
threatened descent on our eastern sea-coast, the alarm would have come along the
coast and not from the interior of the country.
Through the Border counties the alarm spread with rapidity, and on no occasion
when that country was the scene of perpetual and unceasing war, was the summons
to arms more readily obeyed. In Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, and Selkirkshire,
the volunteers and militia got under arms with a degree of rapidity and alacrity
which, considering the distance individuals lived from each other, had something
in it very surprising - they poured to the alarm-posts on the sea-coast in a
state so well armed and so completely appointed, with baggage, provisions, etc.,
as was accounted by the best military judges to render them fit for instant and
effectual service.
There were some particulars in the general alarm which are curious and
interesting. The men of Liddesdale, the most remote point to the westward which
the alarm reached, were so much afraid of being late in the field, that they put
in requisition all the horses they could find, and when they had thus made a
forced march out of their own country, they turned their borrowed steeds loose
to find their way back through the hills, and they all got back safe to their
own stables. Another remarkable circumstance was, the general cry of the
inhabitants of the smaller towns for arms, that they might go along with their
companions. The Selkirkshire Yeomanry made a remarkable march, for although some
of the individuals lived at twenty and thirty miles' distance from the place
where they mustered, they were nevertheless embodied and in order in so short a
period, that they were at Dalkeith, which was their alarm-post, about one
o'clock on the day succeeding the first signal, with men and horses in good
order, though the roads were in a bad state, and many of the troopers must have
ridden forty or fifty miles without drawing bridle. Two members of the corps
chanced to be absent from their homes, and in Edinburgh on private business. The
lately married wife of one of these gentlemen, and the widowed mother of the
other, sent the arms, uniforms, and chargers of the two troopers, that they
might join their companions at Dalkeith