ry of cheating. He had followed such practices for near twenty
years, and commonly when they came there at night they formed a ring
about the place where he sat and listened with the greatest delight to
those relations of evil deeds, which his memory recorded.

It happened one evening, when these worthy persons were assembled
together, that their orator took it in his head to harangue them on the
several alterations which the science of stealing had gone through from
the time of his becoming acquainted with its professors. In former days,
said he, knights of the road were a kind of military order into which
none but decayed gentlemen presumed to intrude themselves. If a younger
brother ran out of his allowance, or if a young heir spent his estate
before he had bought a tolerable understanding, if an under-courtier
lived above his income, or a subaltern officer laid out twice his pay in
rich suits and fine laces, this was the way they took to recruit; and if
they had but money enough left to procure a good horse and a case of
pistols, there was no fear of their keeping up their figure a year or
two, till their faces were known. And then, upon a discovery, they
generally had friends good enough to prevent their swinging, and who,
ten to one, provided handsomely for them afterwards, for fear of their
meeting with a second mischance, and thereby bringing a stain upon their
family. But nowadays a petty alehouse-keeper, if he gives too much
credit, a cheesemonger whose credit grows rotten, or a mechanic that is
weary of living by his fingers-ends, makes no more ado, when he finds
his circumstances uneasy, but whips into a saddle and thinks to get all
things retrieved by the magic of those two formidable words, _Stand and
Deliver._ Hence the profession is grown scandalous, since all the world
knows that the same methods now makes an highwayman, that some years ago
would have got a commission.

_But hark ye_, says one of the company, _in the days of those gentlemen
highwaymen, was there no way left for a poor man to get his living out
of the road of honesty? Puh! Ay_, replied Barnham, _a hundred men were
more ingenious then than they are now, and the fellows were so dexterous
that it was dangerous for a man to laugh who had a good set of teeth,
for fear of having them stole. They made nothing of whipping hats and
wigs off at noon-day; whipping swords from folks' sides when it grew
dusk; or making a midnight visit, in spite of l