Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/188

180 I had heard over-night. Now, having retired from professional life, it is my custom of an evening, when I come up to town for my annual visit, to stay a month or two (as a boarder) with my eldest daughter and her husband, to spend my evenings at a highly respectable tavern, where there is a small parlour-company, and of which my son-in-law is a member. I have now and then told, for the amusement of the party, some of my anecdotes, and I am not ashamed to say that they have been received with great applause. One of our members (I say “our” although I am only an honorary) is clerk to a barrister in the Temple, and for a person in that line of life I consider him highly respectable and trustworthy. He is a very agreeable man indeed to talk with, and he tells me that my stories are not only capital in themselves, but are narrated by me in a manner which gives them an additional interest. He has at last persuaded me to put some of them on paper, and as there have been many changes in the mode of spelling since I went to Chelsea Free School, he has consented to modernise my language.

Before I begin my stories I wish you to understand that I do not pledge myself to furnish you with things of my own invention. They will be stories I have heard told at my master’s table, and may have been printed twenty times before, although I have never seen them. Whenever I copy from any book that Sir Thomas Z used to have brought in from the library, I shall honestly say so. Now to begin.

The other night the conversation at our tavern turned upon the present dreadful garrotting and highway robberies, and as I walked home, and afterwards when I was in bed, I could not help recalling some strange stories about highwaymen, and such like, which I had noted down on the spare leaves of one of my old “pantry-books,” so I employed the next day in transcribing two or three of them, and then gave them to my legal friend to send to you, Mr. Editor.

It was at a dinner for eight in November, 1819, that Sir Thomas asked Mr. S—th, the family lawyer, whether his father had not been once stopped on Finchley Common under rather peculiar circumstances.

“Yes, Sir Thomas,” said Mr. S—th, “my grandfather was a land agent, employed by many persons of rank and quality. He had engagements in most parts of England, and it suited him better to travel in his own gig than in the dawdling, rumbling stage-coach of 1787. There were no country banks in those days, and consequently he at times carried large sums of money about him. It was not unusual at that time for young spendthrifts and gamesters occasionally to “take the road” to replenish their empty pockets, and more than one sprig of an old time-honoured trunk has been secretly lopped off and transferred to the plantations for having told a true man to stand and deliver. One night, my grandfather journeyed towards London across Finchley Common, then a wide, barren heath, with scarcely a dwelling near it, save a roadside inn, the ‘Bald-faced Stag.’

“There were a few aged hawthorn trees scattered about the common, occasionally affording shelter to the belated and storm-o’ertaken traveller. At a moment when the sky was at its cloudiest, two well-mounted men rode from the shadow of one of those thorns, and took their stations according to the approved mode of highwaymen, one man at my grandfather’s horse’s head, whilst the other curtly requested his watch and money. The clouds passed on, and the moonlight revealed the bright barrel of a pistol in close proximity to my grand-dad’s head. Again, all was darkness. Now my honoured forebear was not the man to be robbed without a struggle, and calculating upon such a contingency as the present he always carried a short bludgeon under the seat of his gig, being of opinion that a pistol might hang fire, or miss its mark, and then there would be an end of his power of resistance. Under pretence of complying with the request of the robber he stooped down for his trusty bludgeon, and as he did so, the clouds passed on, and the moonlight fell full upon his face.

‘Mr. S—th!’ exclaimed the man with the pistol.

‘Yes,’ replied my grandfather, coolly feeling for his weapon.

‘Good night, sir,’ said the highwayman, and after whispering to his companion, both men rode off at a canter, leaving my grand-dad agreeably relieved and considerably astonished. Yes, astonished, for he had recognised the voice as that of a gentleman with whom he had been on terms of the closest intimacy. As he passed the ‘Bald-faced Stag,’ two men well mounted were drinking at the door, the moon shining full upon them. They raised their hats as my grandfather drove past, he returned their salute, and to his dying day never mentioned their names even to my grandmother, although she had asked him in season and out of season. His only answer was:

‘They were gentlemen, and behaved to me like gentlemen, I therefore desire to return the compliment. ”

“Ah!” said Mr. N—r—th, “some of those knights of the road were civil enough at times; but, generally speaking, they were great blackguards, cowards, and brutes.”

“Quite right,” said Sir Thomas, “and I have in my mother’s scrap-book, certain cuttings which may interest you.”

The book was brought in, and Sir Thomas read as follows:

“Here’s an account of two robberies more than a hundred years ago.

“Courage seems to have been all on the side of the highwaymen, although it was nothing unusual, I believe, for the chairmen, and even gentlemen’s servants to be in league with the robbers.”