He could also squeeze the blood from the
finger ends of any one who incurred his anger. He was an habitual
drunkard, his greatest boast being that he had once been "teetotal" for
a whole forenoon. When he died he was an overgrown mass of superfluous
fat, weighing at least twenty-five stone. He was said to have earned
quite a thousand pounds per year by his encroachments into the province
of the cleric, and when on his deathbed he heard three carriages arrive,
he consented to marry the three wealthy couples they contained, and
found himself two or three hundred pounds richer than before. He also
boasted that the marriage business had been in his family for quite one
hundred years, and that his uncle, the old soldier Gordon, used to marry
couples in the full uniform of his regiment, the British Grenadiers. He
gave a form of certificate that the persons had declared themselves to
be single, that they were married by the form of the Kirk of Scotland,
and agreeably to that of the Church of England.
[Illustration: GRETNA GREEN.]
One of the most celebrated elopements to Gretna was that of the Earl of
Westmorland and Miss Child, the daughter of the great London banker.
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