Bound intimately up with these affairs, and thought to have originated these singularly loose methods, was the old Scottish custom of “hand-fasting,” still practised in the opening years of the nineteenth century, but with the increase of education, and still more the growth of comfort, then fast dying out. These barbaric customs, resembling in degree some old Welsh observances, mattered little to a peasantry sunk in ignorance, but with the growth of wage-earning and of property, and the consequent sense of responsibility, they could by no possibility survive. “Hand-fasting” was the selection, on approval, of a wife or husband, who would live together for one year on trial. If mutually satisfactory at the close of the year, they became man and wife for good and all; if not, they parted, and were free to choose again. Children, if there were any, were the charge of the non-content partner. The Border must have seemed a Heaven-provided resort to couples bent on evading Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, but, strangely enough, the sufficient virtue of the first step across the dividing-line was not at first generally recognised, and fleeting lovers were originally not content until they had come, post haste, to Edinburgh, where, in the Canongate, they found a crowd of blackguardly scoundrels idling about in greasy and tattered Geneva gowns and pretending to be clergymen, who did their business for them at any prices the circumstances seemed to warrant, from a shilling and a glass of whiskey, up to five guineas. Thus were the runaway Lord George Lennox and Lady Louisa Ker, daughter of the Earl of Ancrum, married, in 1759. Thus, although even so early as 1753, the year before the Marriage Act became law, a “Gretna Green wedding” was performed by Joseph Paisley, the first “Gretna Priest,” it was not until 1771 that the marrying at Gretna Green grew such a recognised institution that registers began to be kept. Gretna stands to all the world for runaway matches, but although by far the most popular place, it was by no means the only one. Any spot on the long lonely seventy miles of Border served the same purpose, and Lamberton Toll, north of Berwick, and Coldstream were not without their advantages, especially from Newcastle-on-Tyne, to which they lay quite handy. The future Earl of Eldon, who ran away as a lad with his Bessie Surtees, got married at Lamberton or at Coldstream. On this West Coast, however, on the “new” road to Gretna, the actual crossing of the Border is at the passage of the little river Sark, half a mile before you come to that more famous hamlet. Although Gretna is pre-eminently famed, and Springfield, just short of it, comes second in popular estimation, a very good case might be made out for giving Sark Bar prominence in this strange history. [Illustration: SARK BAR.] [Sidenote: _THE FATEFUL TOLL-HOUSE_]