eered and encouraged with assurances from their host of the
perfect safety of the particular road they intended taking, the
travellers set out. But usually, when they had gone about a mile, the
coach would stop with a sudden jerk, and a masked man on a magnificent
horse would ride up, pistol in hand, and demand their money or their
life. Sometimes serious encounters took place with this leader and his
band, and then the wounded and terrified victims would drag themselves
back to the Golden Farmer, where the host, full of commiseration for
their misfortunes, would lavish care and kindness upon them. This went
on for years, and it was not until hundreds of robberies had been
committed that the discovery was made of the identity of the fascinating
landlord and the desperate captain of the highwaymen.

Many are the tales the old people at Eversley used to tell of the
"gentlemen of the road" in their fathers' and grandfathers' time. Even
in quiet Eversley itself a curate lived some hundred years ago whose
strange career ended on the gallows. He owned a splendid black horse
which no one ever saw him mount. But it was whispered that if any one
peeped into its stable in the morning the beautiful creature was seen
covered with foam, bathed in perspiration, trembling as if it had just
come in from a long gallop; and at last it was found out that Parson
Darby belonged to the gang of highwaymen on Bagshot Heath. He was caught
red-handed, and hanged close to the Golden Farmer in chains on a gibbet
of which the posts were still standing forty years ago. But what became
of his black horse no one ever could tell me. Now the London road is as
safe and quiet as any other well-kept highway, and the wildest
passengers upon it are a few wandering gypsies, who travel up and down
it from fair to race and from race to fair.

But Reynard is speeding away through the pleasant fir woods, and we are
following him as fast as we can lay legs to ground--scrambling over the
rotten banks, scurrying along the soft rides, lying low on our saddles
to avoid the sweeping boughs, and watching with all our eyes for the
slippery roots that crawl along the surface of the sandy soil. Down
through the bogs, across the bridge by the home farm, past the park,
into the fallow fields, with half a dozen tremendous fences which send
my heart up into my throat till Sintram lands me safe over each, into
the fir woods again, up to the foot of the Queen's Mounts; and there