t death, lay in
prison under sentence, and that, to save his life, the brave lady,
disguised as a man, on two separate occasions, on Tweedmouth moor,
robbed the mail by which her father's death warrant was being conveyed
from London to Edinburgh. Thus she twice prevented the sentence from
being carried out, and eventually the prisoner was pardoned.

The greater number of highway robberies in the Border, however, were
accomplished without the aid of a horse or the disguise of a crape mask.
The Border highwayman, as a rule, was no picturesque Claude Duval, no
chivalrous villain of romance who would tread a measure in the moonlight
with the lady whose coach he had plundered, thereafter returning her
jewels in recompense for the favour of the dance. He was much more often
of the squalid type--in a word, a footpad--frequently a member of some
wandering gipsy gang, who, attending country fair or tryst, had little
difficulty in ascertaining which one of the many farmers present it
would be easiest and most profitable to rob as he steered his more or
less devious course homeward in the evening across the waste. What the
farmer had that day been paid for his cattle or sheep he usually carried
with him, probably in the form of gold; for in those days there were of
course no country agencies of banks in which the money might be safely
deposited. Not unusually, too, the farmer had swallowed enough liquor to
make him reckless of consequences; and the loneliness of the
country-side, and the absence of decent roads, too often combined with
the condition of the farmer to make him an easy prey to some little band
of miscreants who had dogged him from the fair.

Frequently, too, these robbers were in league with the keepers of low
roadside public-houses, where passengers on their homeward way were
encouraged--nothing loth, as a rule--to halt and refresh steed and
rider, and possibly whilst they drank their pistols were tampered with.
Who does not remember the meeting of Harry Bertram and Dandie Dinmont in
such a place? And who has not read in the author's notes to _Guy
Mannering_, Sir Walter's account of the visit to Mump's Ha' of Fighting
Charlie of Liddesdale, and what befell him thereafter? In spite of a
head that the potations pressed on him by an over-kind landlady had
caused to hum like an angry hive of bees, Charlie had sense enough,
after he had travelled a few miles on his homeward way, to examine his
pistols. Finding that the