Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/53

. Holloway carried off Mr. Steele's hat and wore it about London, till, at the instigation of Hatfield, he one day filled it with stones and throw it over Westminster Bridge. The booty was only twenty-seven shillings.

The two wretches were hung at Newgate on February 23, 1807. Holloway kept swearing he was innocent, and shouting, "No verdict, no verdict, gentlemen. Innocent, innocent." The long delay in the arrest of the men, and some lingering belief in their innocence, had attracted forty thousand people to the narrow street of the Old Bailey. When the malefactors appeared on the scaffold, the mob seethed like a black and angry sea. A struggle for life began, and several women and boys were instantly crushed to death. A savage fight for life ensued. At the end of Green Arbourcourt, nearly opposite the debtors' door, a pieman unfortunately dropped his basket, and many persons falling over this, were instantly trampled to death. A cart overloaded with spectators breaking down just then added to the horror and despair of the scene. The episodes were agonising. A father saw his son, a fine boy of twelve, trodden to death, but escaped himself with some cruel bruises. A woman with a child at the breast, in dying threw her child to a bystander, who tossed it to another who threw it to another, until it reached some people in a cart, who saved it. Upwards of a cart-load of shoes, hats, and petticoats were picked up. Twenty-seven bodies were taken to St. Bartholomew's Hospital alone.

Two more legends of the heath must not be forgotten. In James the First's time (December 5, 1606), two young hot-blooded lawyers fought a duel alone in a wild part of the heath. They were found, side by side, each having spitted the other with his rapier. In this extremity they had become reconciled, though too weak from loss of blood to help each other. Three years before this, Sir John Townsend (who had been knighted at the siege of Cadiz by the chivalrous Earl of Essex) fought a duel here on horseback with Sir Matthew Brown, Baron of Beechworth, with sword and pistol. Both combatants were dangerously wounded in this desperate and fierce rencontre, Sir Matthew dying on the spot, and Sir John Townsend soon after. So the crow flies, and so the world went once. 

 

Briton—I know him by his talking loud about my "breakfast." How often do I hear the florid, white-whiskered Briton, suffering from the heat acutely, tell his friend and tell me—for he does not care who hears him, and prefers an audience—that "he'd speak to Gungl, at the Hesse, about giving some more of that wild deer," or "that he was going to get his cutlets, and very odd the Times was so late;" or else what seems the standard grumble, about "kreutzers and their informal money. Look, I say, what can you make of such things as these?" And he does seem to think that wherever the Englishman goes, his money, meats, steaks, joints, beds, clubs, Times, &c., should go with him, and be the money, meat, steaks of the country. (My dearest Dora, will you know me after this, or do you suppose it is your poor invalid that is writing? Such a change in me already—to be affecting to be funny!) But I go on. Then I see the great doctor of the place, Seidler, whose book, Homburg and its Springs, is in every bookseller's. He is walking about here, talking to the English, who hang on his words, and his carriage and horses wait at the end of the walk—a good advertisement, for every stranger asks whose it is. The Briton with the white whiskers, I remark, is great on Seidler. At dinner he tells every one what "Seidler said to me this morning. Seidler made me cut off a tumbler of the kayserbrowning, and told me if I had taken it another day he would not have answered for it. Egad! I was working away, and if he hadn't stopped me," &c. Seidler, I can see, is looked on as a magician who can do as he likes with the springs, and mysteriously check their whole efficiency if you offend him. Any one who takes them without consulting him goes to destruction at once; or else they do the patient no good at all. We might as well be quaffing common spring water. A third of a tumbler, he will say, every half-hour in the morning, or a tumbler at seven, and half a tumbler at a quarter to ten. The idea seems to be, that, delayed till ten, the prescription would have no efficacy; and I see the fresh white-whiskered man, watch in hand, counting the moments. I go myself to Seidler, and believe him to be clever; and he certainly hit off my case at once. But these little tricks the English themselves force on him, as their maladies are so tricky and fanciful. He says, three weeks of the water, and, of course, of Seidler—three tumblers of the former, and one interview with the latter per diem—"will make a new man of me." And I believe him. My dear, shall I confess it, I can bear this separation, and am not craving to be back. It will be better in the end I should be here. But after ten days I know I shall get restless and eager to see your pretty face. Now, dear, I stop this log, for I