s master of the road. His hands were, as yet,
unstained with blood; he was ever prompt to check the disposition to
outrage, and to prevent, as much as lay in his power, the commission of
violence by his associates. Of late, since he had possessed himself of
his favorite mare, Black Bess, his robberies had been perpetrated with a
suddenness of succession, and at distances so apparently impracticable,
that the idea of all having been executed by one man, was rejected as an
impossibility; and the only way of reconciling the description of the
horse and rider, which tallied in each instance, was the supposition
that these attacks were performed by confederates similarly mounted and
similarly accoutred.

There was, in all this, as much of the "_famae sacra fames_" as of the
"_auri_;" of the hungering after distinction, as well as of the appetite
of gain. Enamored of his vocation, Turpin delighted to hear himself
designated as the Flying Highwayman; and it was with rapturous triumph
that he found his single-handed feats attributed to a band of marauders.
But this state of things could not long endure; his secret was blown;
the vigilance of the police was aroused; he was tracked to his haunts;
and, after a number of hairbreadth 'scapes, which he only effected by
miracle, or by the aid of his wonder-working mare, he reluctantly
quitted the heathy hills of Bagshot, the Pampas plains of Hounslow--over
which like an archetype of the galloping Sir Francis Head, he had so
often scoured,--the gorsy commons of Highgate, Hampstead, and Finchley,
the marshy fields of Battersea, almost all of which he had been known to
visit in a single night, and leaving these beaten tracks to the
occupation of younger and less practised hands, he bequeathed to them,
at the same time, his own reversionary interest in the gibbets thereupon
erected, and betook himself to the country.

After a journey of more or less success, our adventurer found himself at
Rookwood, whither he had been invited after a grand field-day by its
hospitable and by no means inquisitive owner. Breach of faith and good
fellowship formed no part of Turpin's character; he had his lights as
well as his shades; and as long as Sir Piers lived, his purse and
coffers would have been free from molestation, except, "so far," Dick
said, "as a cog or two of dice went. My dice, you know, are longs for
odd and even, a bale of bar'd cinque deuces," a pattern of which he
always carried with him