There was, of course, no possible defence—­indeed, he owned up, and at the next assizes was condemned to death.  And here the link with the fate of Wallace and Hislop came in.  As he lay awaiting execution, Hall confessed that it was he, that February night in 1785, who had stunned and robbed Captain Craes.  He had seen the old sailor making his not very steady way homewards, and had followed him, and at the loneliest part of the street, where no house showed a light, he came up behind and tripped him; and as the captain essayed to get again on his feet, Hall had struck him a violent blow on the head with a cudgel, stunning him.  The man told, too, how a little later he had gone into a public-house to get a drink, and that there he found some men playing at cards; he had joined them, and had lost money, and one of the men (Hislop, as he afterwards understood) had changed for him a guinea which he had a little time before taken from the pocket of the man he had stunned.

Thus were Wallace and Hislop added to the long list of the victims of circumstantial evidence.

ILLICIT DISTILLING AND SMUGGLING

From about the close of the seventeenth until well on in the nineteenth century, smuggling was carried on to a large extent in the Border counties of England and Scotland, not only as regards the evasion of customs duties on imported articles, but as well in the form of illicit distillation.

In the good old times, better than half-way through the eighteenth century, cargoes consisting of ankers of French brandy, bales of lace, cases of tobacco, boxes of tea, and what not, were “run” almost nightly on certain parts of the coasts of Berwick, Northumberland, and Galloway, borne inland by long strings of pack-horses, and securely hid away in some snug retreat, perhaps far up among the Border hills.  Few of the inhabitants but looked with lenient eye on the doings of the “free-traders”; few, very few, deemed it any crime to take advantage of their opportunities for getting liquor, tea, and tobacco at a cheaper rate than they could buy the same articles after they had paid toll to the King.  Smuggled goods, too, were thought to possess quality and flavour better than any belonging to those that had come ashore in legitimate fashion; the smuggler’s touch, perhaps, in this respect was—­

     “... sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
     Or Cytherea’s breath”;

it imparted to the brandy, apparently, a vague, unnameable something that tickled the palate of the drinker, to the tobacco an extra aroma that was grateful to the nostrils of those who smoked it.  Nay, the very term “smuggled” raised the standard of those goods in the estimation of some very honest folk, and caused them to smack their lips in anticipation.  Perhaps this superstition as to the supreme quality of things smuggled is not even yet wholly dead.  Who has not met the hoary waterside ruffian, who,