able-yard at the time. He
got out for half an hour, to eat, I fancy. Be sure that I played him a
trick in the mean while."

"What for?" asked Ned.

"Self and servant."

"The post-boys?"

"Ay, I forgot them. Never mind, you, must frighten them."

"Forwards!" cried Ned; and his horse sprang from his armed heel.

"One moment," said Lovett; "I must put on my mask. Soho, Robin, soho!
Now for it,--forwards!"

As the trees rapidly disappeared behind them, the riders entered, at a
hand gallop, on a broad tract of waste land interspersed with dikes and
occasionally fences of hurdles, over which their horses bounded like
quadrupeds well accustomed to such exploits.

Certainly at that moment, what with the fresh air, the fitful moonlight
now breaking broadly out, now lost in a rolling cloud, the exciting
exercise, and that racy and dancing stir of the blood, which all action,
whether evil or noble in its nature, raises in our veins; what with
all this, we cannot but allow the fascination of that lawless life,--a
fascination so great that one of the most noted gentlemen highwaymen of
the day, one too who had received an excellent education and mixed in no
inferior society, is reported to have said, when the rope was about his
neck, and the good Ordinary was exhorting him to repent of his
ill-spent life, "Ill-spent, you dog! 'Gad!" (smacking his lips) "it was
delicious!"

"Fie! fie! Mr. -------, raise your thoughts to Heaven!"

"But a canter across the common--oh!" muttered the criminal; and his
soul cantered off to eternity.

So briskly leaped the heart of the leader of the three that, as they
now came in view of the main road, and the distant wheel of a carriage
whirred on the ear, he threw up his right hand with a joyous gesture,
and burst into a boyish exclamation of hilarity and delight.

"Whist, captain!" said Ned, checking his own spirits with a mock air of
gravity, "let us conduct ourselves like gentlemen; it is only your low
fellows who get into such confoundedly high spirits; men of the world
like us should do everything as if their hearts were broken."

"Melancholy ever cronies with Sublimity, and Courage is sublime," said
Augustus, with the pomp of a maxim-maker.

[A maxim which would have pleased Madame de Stael, who thought that
philosophy consisted in fine sentiments. In the "Life of Lord
Byron," just published by Mr. Moore, the distinguished biographer
makes a similar assertion