ill upon
conviction of the party be entitled to the Same Reward of Two
Hundred Pounds, and will also receive his Majesty's most gracious
Pardon.

"By Command of the Postmaster-General,

"ANTH. TODD, Sec."

The robbery, which was graphically described by Mr. G. Hendy, of St.
Martin's-le-Grand, in the 1901 Christmas Number of "The Road," does not
appear to have been a very daring one as regards the act itself, but it
was so as to its consequences. There was no mail coach--no driver in
scarlet--no mail guard--no passengers, but only a ramshackle iron mail
cart--a "postboy" as driver and carrying no arms. What a contrast is
this old mail cart with a single horse, carrying the mails for all the
places enumerated in the Notice, to the splendidly appointed four-horse
mail coaches of a period thirty years later on, or to the present time,
when on the Great Western Railway one whole train is used to carry only
a moiety of the King's mail to Bristol and the West! No wonder that the
postboy fell an easy victim to the highwaymen, who bound him and threw
him into an out-of-the-way field. The desperadoes proved to be two
brothers, young men of the name of Weston.

The Westons, after the robbery, went up and down the country on the
North road very rapidly, in order to get rid of the L10,000 to L15,000
worth of bank notes and bills which they plundered from the mails. The
Bow Street runners were on their track from the first, and the chase
continued from London to Carlisle and back. The vagabonds were not,
however, captured, and the notice was exhibited all over the country,
with the addition of the description of the men wanted by the
thief-catchers.

In 1782, the brothers were tried for another offence and acquitted, but
they were arrested at once for the robbery of the Bristol mail and
committed to Newgate. On trial they were found guilty, and paid the
penalty of death by hanging at Tyburn, on the 3rd September, 1782. In
later years the death penalty for robbing mails was abolished, and at
least one old sinner who robbed the Bristol mail eventually did
remarkably well through having committed that dire offence against the
laws, and by having been transported to the Antipodes at his country's
expense.

Particulars of his career have been furnished by Mr. R.C. Newick, of
Cloudshill, St. George, Bristol, by means of the following extract from
a work published in 1853, "Adventures in Australia, '52-'53," by