bbed a mounted postman of his mail-bags--having first
ascertained that the postman was unarmed. And here Hudson came to the
end of his tether. The postman gave the alarm, and the robber was
arrested in Newcastle the following day, some of the property lost from
the mail-bags still in his possession. At his trial the following week
at Durham Assizes he did not attempt to make any defence, but after
conviction, by confessing where the booty was hid, he made what
reparation lay in his power. Poor wretch! He had not even the posthumous
satisfaction of going down to posterity as a bold, bad man, a hero of
the road. Not for him was it to emulate Jack Shepherd or Dick Turpin; he
was of feebler clay, unfitted to excel in evil-doing.

After the barbarous fashion of the day, they hanged his body in chains
on the scene of his poor, feebly-executed crimes; and there, on
Gateshead Fell, through many a dreary winter's night, fringed with
loathly icicles, lashed by rains, battered by hail, dangled that
pitiful, shrunken figure, creaking dolefully, as it swung to and fro in
the bitter blasts that come howling in from a storm-tossed North Sea.
And far from acting as the warning intended to others, so little was
this gruesome thing a "terror to evil-doers," that the vicinity of the
gibbet actually became a place noted for the frequency of crimes of
violence.

There have been others, of course, who might perhaps be recognised as
Border highwaymen, though not many of them could claim to have achieved
even moderate notoriety. Drummond, who was hanged at Tyburn in 1730,
certainly began his infamous career in the north, but that was quite a
petty beginning, and--at least after his return from transportation to
the Virginian Plantations--his chief haunts were Hounslow or Bagshot
Heaths, or other places in the neighbourhood of London.

But at least there was one Border highwayman--or is "footpad" here the
more correct term?--who, if the story is true, may surely claim to have
been the most picturesque and romantic of criminals. In this instance
the malefactor was a woman, not a man, and her name was Grizel Cochrane,
member of (or at least sprung from) a noble family, which later produced
one of the most famous seamen in the annals of naval history. Her story
is very well known, and it may therefore be sufficient to say here that
her father, having been concerned in one of the many political
conspiracies which in those days were judged to meri