I was offered instead a work in two volumes on the notorious highwaymen of history, and for a moment my plot swerved in that direction.

replies the gallant highwayman, contriving with some address to retain his hold of the lady's hand, though encumbered by spurs, a sword, pistols, a mask, and an enormous three-cornered hat.

Yet after twenty years of love and hope and fear comes a handsome young fellow, a charming highwayman to a parent's eye, and whisks her away after two months' courtship.

Then you might have been able to control us; but when you see before you a desperate highwayman, a daring smuggler, a blood-thirsty pirate, a wily poacher, a powerful ruffian, a reckless burglar, a bold conspirator, and a murderer by proxy, you well may tremble!"

You remember how the handsome highwayman, at the first far clatter of hoofs on the great North Road, is up and out on the scullery roof of the inn before you have turned the page, and is deep in Lonely Copse (wearing the serving-wench's stomacher) before his first fat pursuer has said, "Open in the name of the Law," below his window?

I found amusement in alternately exciting and lulling to sleep the causeless fears of my timorous companion, who tried in vain to induce a Scotchman with whom we dined in Darlington to ride with him, because the landlord informed us "that for as peaceable a gentleman as Mr. Campbell was, he was, moreover, as bold as a lionseven highwaymen had he defeated with his single arm, as he came from Whitson tryste.

It was amusing to hear the excuses, threats, and the like; but the fact remained the same, that a dozen of us had been robbed by a lone highwayman.

The theatre is small, but the audience if not select are enthusiastic; the stage is narrow, but affords room for a deal of strutting and striding about on the part of an overpowering actor in the inevitable belt and boots of the melodramatic highwayman.

His track lay along the old Fossway, a road infested in those days by murderous highwaymen; yet, unarmed and unattended, unknown and unappreciated, did that mighty man of genius set cheerfully out on his long and solitary way.

On this day numerous highwaymen were met, but they dared not molest the travellers on account of the large number in the party.

Also they stopped frequently, King making an excuse of showing her points of interest; the tiny valley where one could be sure of a glimpse of a brown bear, the grazing-lands of mountain deer, the pass into the cliff-bound hiding-place of the picturesque highwaymen of an earlier day whence they drove stolen horses into Nevada, where they secreted other horses stolen in Nevada and to be disposed of down in the Sacramento Valley.

" "They were the 'Knights of St. Nicholas,' which, in the slang of the middle ages, meant what they call in the West road agents; indeed, plain highwaymen they were called in England in Bacon's day.

He is a spiritual highwayman that robs on the road to heaven.

He is but a tame highwayman, that does the same things by stratagem and design which the other does by force, makes men deliver their understandings first, and after their purses.

" Aloud he said: "Oh, well, there are two of us, so it would be a bold highwayman that would venture to attack us.

If the Cid came to life again he would be in jail, he would have become a highwayman, unable to adjust himself to the inequalities and injustice of modern life.

"That," said the surgeon, "is a cast from the celebrated Lancashire highwayman, who concealed his profession for some time from his neighbors, by drawing woollen stockings over his horse's legs, and in that way muffling the clatter which he must else have made in riding up a flagged alley that led to his stable.