The oldest-established and most famous “priest” after Paisley was Robert Elliot, who married Paisley’s grand-daughter, Ann Graham, at the beginning of 1811, and lived at the former “King’s Head” from that date. When he published his “Memoirs” in 1842, he claimed that he had for the twenty-nine years past been the “sole and only parson of Gretna Green”; an impudent falsehood disproved by the existence to this day of the registers kept by David Lang, who from 1792 until 1827 married a great number of people and was particularly famous as having married Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Miss Ellen Turner, whom he abducted in 1826. David Lang had been in his youth an itinerant draper. On his journeys southward, through Lancashire, he was spirited away by the Press Gang, to serve aboard His Majesty’s ships. After many adventures, including that of being captured by Paul Jones, the pirate, he settled down here, and was in the course of time succeeded by his son, Simon, who died in 1872, and was described by Blanchard Jerrold, who visited Gretna in 1852, as “a spare old man, dressed with some pretensions to gentility.” He in turn was succeeded by his son, William Lang, who was the local postman, and had some faint claims to be considered a “priest”; whatever such claims may be worth in a place where, as already shown, any one has an undisputed right to marry any one else. Elliot, however, was by way of being a literary character, and in history writ about Gretna Green bulks large, because of his printed spoutings: the printed word being, even among those who ought to know better, sacred. The sheer truth of it is that, at one and the same time, there were no fewer than four prominent establishments devoted to the marrying trade. The fact is scarcely remarkable, when we consider the number of them that committed matrimony at Gretna or Springfield; at that time averaging four hundred annually. Elliot was but one. He gives a return of the numbers he married, beginning in 1811 with 58, and ending in 1840 with 42. His busiest years were from 1821 to 1836, and the busiest 1824 and 1825, when he married 196 and 198 couples. In all, he married no fewer than 3,872 couples. [Sidenote: _JOHN LINTON_]