His
treatment of Hugh Peters in Enfield Chace is among his triumphs. At the
first encounter the Presbyterian plucked up courage enough to oppose
his adversary with texts. To Hind's command of 'Stand and deliver!' duly
enforced with a loaded pistol, the ineffable Peters replied with ox-eye
sanctimoniously upturned: 'Thou shalt not steal; let him that
stole, steal no more,' adding thereto other variations of the eighth
commandment. Hind immediately countered with exhortations against the
awful sin of murder, and rebuked the blasphemy of the Regicides, who,
to defend their own infamy, would wrest Scripture from its meaning.
'Did you not, O monster of impiety,' mimicked Hind in the preacher's own
voice, 'pervert for your own advantage the words of the Psalmist, who
said, "Bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of
iron"? Moreover, was it not Solomon who wrote: "Men do not despise a
thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry"? And is not my
soul hungry for gold and the Regicides' discomfiture?' Peters was still
fumbling after texts when the final argument: 'Deliver thy money, or I
will send thee out of the world!' frightened him into submission, and
thirty broad pieces were Hind's reward.

Not long afterwards he confronted Bradshaw near Sherborne, and, having
taken from him a purse fat with Jacobuses, he bade the Sergeant stand
uncovered while he delivered a discourse upon gold, thus shaped by
tradition: 'Ay, marry, sir, this is the metal that wins my heart for
ever! O precious gold, I admire and adore thee as much as Bradshaw,
Prynne, or any villain of the same stamp. This is that incomparable
medicament, which the republican physicians call the wonder-working
plaster. It is truly catholic in operation, and somewhat akin to the
Jesuit's powder, but more effectual. The virtues of it are strange and
various; it makes justice deaf as well as blind, and takes out spots of
the deepest treason more cleverly than castle-soap does common stains;
it alters a man's constitution in two or three days, more than the
virtuoso's transfusion of blood can do in seven years. 'Tis a great
alexiopharmick, and helps poisonous principles of rebellion, and those
that use them. It miraculously exalts and purifies the eyesight, and
makes traitors behold nothing but innocence in the blackest malefactors.
'Tis a mighty cordial for a declining cause; it stifles faction or
schism, as certainly as the itch is destroyed