graziers, returning from a
distant market; clerks of traders, travelling to collect what was due to
their masters, in provincial towns; with now and then an officer going
down into the country upon the recruiting service, were, at this period,
the persons by whom the turnpikes and tapsters were kept in exercise. Our
speech, therefore, was of tithes and creeds, of beeves and grain, of
commodities wet and dry, and the solvency of the retail dealers,
occasionally varied by the description of a siege, or battle, in
Flanders, which, perhaps, the narrator only gave me at second hand.
Robbers, a fertile and alarming theme, filled up every vacancy; and the
names of the Golden Farmer, the Flying Highwayman, Jack Needham, and
other Beggars' Opera heroes, were familiar in our mouths as household
words. At such tales, like children closing their circle round the fire
when the ghost story draws to its climax, the riders drew near to each
other, looked before and behind them, examined the priming of their
pistols, and vowed to stand by each other in case of danger; an
engagement which, like other offensive and defensive alliances, sometimes
glided out of remembrance when there was an appearance of actual peril.

Of all the fellows whom I ever saw haunted by terrors of this nature, one
poor man, with whom I travelled a day and a half, afforded me most
amusement. He had upon his pillion a very small, but apparently a very
weighty portmanteau, about the safety of which he seemed particularly
solicitous; never trusting it out of his own immediate care, and
uniformly repressing the officious zeal of the waiters and ostlers, who
offered their services to carry it into the house. With the same
precaution he laboured to conceal, not only the purpose of his journey,
and his ultimate place of destination, but even the direction of each
day's route. Nothing embarrassed him more than to be asked by any one,
whether he was travelling upwards or downwards, or at what stage he
intended to bait. His place of rest for the night he scrutinised with the
most anxious care, alike avoiding solitude, and what he considered as bad
neighbourhood; and at Grantham, I believe, he sate up all night to avoid
sleeping in the next room to a thick-set squinting fellow, in a black
wig, and a tarnished gold-laced waistcoat. With all these cares on his
mind, my fellow traveller, to judge by his thews and sinews, was a man
who might have set danger at defiance with as m