DUMFRIESSHIKE AND GaLLOWAY A CEXTUEY AGD. 77 



expected accidents or disasters being laid to their account as late 

 as the year 1831. 



I may further note one condition of the age which, though 

 not exclusively affecting Galloway and Dumfriesshire, must have 

 pressed particularly severely on the poorer inhabitants of the most 

 thinly populated parts of the country. I mean what fuU}'^ merits 

 to be termed the iniquitous postal system of the time. Letters 

 were a luxury in which the poor could not indulg-e. They had to 

 pay the exorbitant postal charges. People of rank and wealth 

 got their gossiping letters sent free of charge by securing the 

 frank of some peer or official personage. In more thickly 

 populated districts the poor might sometimes hear of distant 

 friends or relatives through the medium of some passing traveller; 

 but in the lonely wilds of Galloway and Dumfriesshire many a 

 heart must have ached in vain for news of dearly loved ones far 

 away, and gone down to the grave in ignorance of what had been 

 their fate in life. Another reminiscence of my father's is worth 

 pages of denunciation of the wretched system. My grandfather 

 was one of the Commissioners of Customs for Scotland, and had 

 thus a practically unlimited right of franking-. My father has 

 often told me how, when he and his brothers were boys at school 

 in Edinburgh, they used occasionally to send packets of sweets to 

 their cousins in Dumfriesshire or to other young friends by post, 

 franked, which would have otherwise cost 3s to 4s. And this 

 while parents and children, even husbands and wives, if parted, 

 could receive no news of the absent ones because of the pi-o- 

 hibitory rule of postage which they must pay. 



One further recollection of my father's I may quote as 

 illustrative of the chances afforded to tramps in such out-of-the- 

 world districts by the then disgraceful condition of the coinage. 

 There were no milled edg-es, and few of the smaller coins, such 

 as shillings and sixpences, were anything more than round pieces 

 of metal, with only the faintest trace of any stamps left upon 

 them. The forge at Mennock, close by that bridge which 

 iguominiously collapsed lately, was then kept by an old retainer 

 of my father's family, and was, of course, a favourite resort of 

 his brothers and himself. He told me he had often seen a tramp 

 come in, lay a shilling on the anvil, take the hammer and beat it 

 out, and then cut three sixpences out of it. 



