The church-like Town Hall, which is also a market-house and the town gaol, does indeed perform one of the functions of a church, for the ugly Puritan parish church of the town has no tower, and so the steeple of the Town Hall rings for it. In the broad High Street running northward from this commanding building are all the prominent inns of the town, to and from which the coaches came and went until the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick Railway in 1846. Some of the short stages appear to have been misery-boxes, according to Dean Ramsay, who used to tell an amusing anecdote of one of them. On one occasion a fellow-traveller at Berwick complained of the rivulets of rain-water falling down his neck from the cracked roof. He drew the coachman’s attention to it on the first opportunity, but all the answer he got was the matter-of-fact remark, “Ay, mony a ane has complained o’ that hole.” The mail-coaches leaving Berwick on their journey north were allowed to take an extra—a fourth—outside passenger. Mail-coaches running in England were, until 1834, strictly limited to four inside and three outside. Of these last, one sat on the box, beside the coachman, while the other two were seated immediately behind, on the fore part of the roof, with their backs to the guard. This was a rule originally very strictly enforced, and had its origin in the fear that, if more were allowed, it would be an easy matter for desperadoes to occupy the seats as passengers and to suddenly overpower both coachman and guard. The guard in his solitary perch at the back, with his sword-case and blunderbuss ready to hand, could have shot or slashed at those in front, on his observing any suspicious movement, and it is somewhat surprising that no nervous guard ever did wound some innocent passenger who may have turned round to ask him a question. The concession of an extra seat on the outside of coaches entering Scotland was granted to the mail-contractors in view of the more widely scattered population of Scotland, and of the comparative scarcity of chance passengers on the way. But there is very great uncertainty as to the number of passengers allowed on the mails in later years. Moses Nobbs, one of the last of the old mail-guards, states that no fewer than eight passengers were allowed outside at the end of the coaching age. Doubtless this was owing both to the complaints of the contractors that with the smaller complement they could not make the business pay, and to the growing security of the roads.