ate vicinity of large towns, all
roads were completely blocked, and communication was absolutely cut off.
The mails had ceased to run, and of course in those days the electric
telegraph was unknown. Thus, many a man, the father of a family, was
parted indefinitely from wife and children without possibility of
allaying their anxiety for his welfare; many a commercial traveller
passed week after week in some roadside inn, waiting vainly for the
long-delayed thaw to enable him to communicate with his employer. And
had country people in those days depended for their supplies on
tradesmen's carts, as is the custom now, many a family must have found
itself in the direst straits ere the storm was half over.

Then a few years later came that memorable storm of 1831, of which men
in Tweedsmuir still speak almost as if it were an event of yesterday. It
was in the days of the old mail coaches, and the event which served to
fix this storm indelibly in the public mind occurred on or near the old
coach road from Dumfries to Edinburgh. The road runs past Moffat and up
something like five miles of very heavy gradient to the Devil's Beef
Tub, ascending in that distance nearly nine hundred feet; from the Tub
it crosses the lonely, desolate watershed which divides Tweed from
Annan, then by easy slope drops past Tweedshaws and Badlieu, and so by
Tweedsmuir and the old Crook Inn--with Broad Law upheaving his massive
shoulder on the right--slips gradually into country less unkind in days
of storm than are those bleak upper regions.

Snow had been falling all day on the 1st of February 1831, and the
morning mail from Dumfries to Edinburgh was already late in reaching
Moffat. Would "she" go on, would "she" risk the terrible drifts that
even now must have formed nearer the bleak moorland summit? And the
little knot of faithful admirers who, according to custom, daily
assembled by one's and two's about the inn door at Moffat to wait the
coming of the coach--their one excitement--agreed that "MacGeorge would
gang on if the de'il himsel' stude across the road." MacGeorge was
guard of the mail-coach, a fine, determined man, an old soldier, one
imbued with abnormally strong sense of duty. Once before, for some quite
unavoidable delay, the Post-Office authorities had "quarrelled" him (as
he expressed it), and this undeserved blame rankled in the old soldier's
heart. It should not be said of him a second time that he had failed to
get his mails throu