One of this long line of Hymen’s secular priesthood at Lamberton Toll had, early in the nineteenth century, an unhappy time of it, owing to an error of judgment and an ignorance of the law scarcely credible. Joseph Atkinson, the toll-keeper, was away one day at Berwick when a runaway pair arrived at the gate. His wife, or another, sent them after him, and in Berwick the ceremony, such as it was, was performed. Now Berwick is a county of itself, and the inhabitants boast, or used to, that their town belongs to neither England nor Scotland. It is hinted (by those who do not belong to Berwick) that it belongs instead to the devil, which possibly is a reminiscence of the townsfolk’s smuggling days, on the part of those who duly render unto Cæsar. This by the way. Unhappily for Mr. Joseph Atkinson, Berwick owes allegiance to English law, as he found when his ceremony was declared null and void, and he was duly sentenced to seven years transportation for having contravened the Marriage Act of 1753. [Picture: Off to the Border] Halidon Hill, where the English avenged Bannockburn upon the Scots in 1333, is on the crest of the upland to the west of Lamberton Toll. Now the road runs upon the edge of the black cliffs that plunge down into the North Sea, commanding bold views of a stern and iron-bound coast. Horses, coachmen, guards, and passengers alike quailed before the storms that swept these exposed miles, and even the highwaymen sought other and more sheltered spots. Macready, on tour in the north, was snowed up here, in the severe winter of 1813–14. Coming south through the deep and still falling snow, he travelled in a cutting made in the drifts for miles between Ross Inn and Berwick-on-Tweed. “We did not reach Newcastle,” he says, “until nearly two hours after midnight: and fortunate was it for the theatre and ourselves that we had not delayed our journey, for the next day the mails were stopped; nor for more than six weeks was there any conveyance by carriage between Edinburgh and Newcastle. After some weeks, a passage was cut through the snow for the guards to carry the mails on horseback, but for a length of time the communications every way were very irregular.”