The Captain is ogling the chambermaid in
the wooden gallery, or bribing her to know who is the pretty young
mistress that has come in the coach? The pack-horses are in the great
stable, and the drivers and ostlers carousing in the tap. And in Mrs.
Landlady's bar, over a glass of strong waters, sits a gentleman of
military appearance, who travels with pistols, as all the rest of the
world does, and has a rattling grey mare in the stables which will be
saddled and away with its owner half an hour before the "Fly" sets out on
its last day's flight. And some five miles on the road, as the Exeter
"Fly" comes jingling and creaking onwards, it will suddenly be brought to
a halt by a gentleman on a grey mare, with a black vizard on his face, who
thrusts a long pistol into the coach window, and bids the company to hand
out their purses.... It must have been no small pleasure even to sit in
the great kitchen in those days, and see the tide of humankind pass by. We
arrive at places now, but we travel no more. Addison talks jocularly of a
difference of manner and costume being quite perceivable at Staines, where
there passed a young fellow "with a very tolerable periwig", though, to be
sure, his hat was out of fashion, and had a Ramillies cock. I would have
liked to travel in those days (being of that class of travellers who are
proverbially pretty easy _coram latronibus_) and have seen my friend with
the grey mare and the black vizard. Alas! there always came a day in the
life of that warrior when it was the fashion to accompany him as he
passed--without his black mask, and with a nosegay in his hand, accompanied
by halberdiers and attended by the sheriff,--in a carriage without springs,
and a clergyman jolting beside him to a spot close by Cumberland Gate and
the Marble Arch, where a stone still records that here Tyburn turnpike
stood. What a change in a century; in a few years! Within a few yards of
that gate the fields began: the fields of his exploits, behind the hedges
of which he lurked and robbed. A great and wealthy city has grown over
those meadows. Were a man brought to die there now, the windows would be
closed and the inhabitants keep their houses in sickening horror. A
hundred years back, people crowded to see that last act of a highwayman's
life, and make jokes on it. Swift laughed at him, grimly advising him to
provide a Holland shirt and white cap crowned with a crimson or black
ribbon for his exit, to mount the cart