was a man
who might have set danger at defiance with as much impunity as most men.
He was strong and well built; and, judging from his gold-laced hat and
cockade, seemed to have served in the army, or, at least, to belong to
the military profession in one capacity or other. His conversation also,
though always sufficiently vulgar, was that of a man of sense, when the
terrible bugbears which haunted his imagination for a moment ceased to
occupy his attention. But every accidental association recalled them. An
open heath, a close plantation, were alike subjects of apprehension; and
the whistle of a shepherd lad was instantly converted into the signal of
a depredator. Even the sight of a gibbet, if it assured him that one
robber was safely disposed of by justice, never failed to remind him how
many remained still unhanged.

I should have wearied of this fellow's company, had I not been still more
tired of my own thoughts. Some of the marvellous stories, however, which
he related, had in themselves a cast of interest, and another whimsical
point of his peculiarities afforded me the occasional opportunity of
amusing myself at his expense. Among his tales, several of the
unfortunate travellers who fell among thieves, incurred that calamity
from associating themselves on the road with a well-dressed and
entertaining stranger, in whose company they trusted to find protection
as well as amusement; who cheered their journey with tale and song,
protected them against the evils of over-charges and false reckonings,
until at length, under pretext of showing a near path over a desolate
common, he seduced his unsuspicious victims from the public road into
some dismal glen, where, suddenly blowing his whistle, he assembled his
comrades from their lurking-place, and displayed himself in his true
colours--the captain, namely, of the band of robbers to whom his unwary
fellow-travellers had forfeited their purses, and perhaps their lives.
Towards the conclusion of such a tale, and when my companion had wrought
himself into a fever of apprehension by the progress of his own
narrative, I observed that he usually eyed me with a glance of doubt and
suspicion, as if the possibility occurred to him, that he might, at that
very moment, be in company with a character as dangerous as that which
his tale described. And ever and anon, when such suggestions pressed
themselves on the mind of this ingenious self-tormentor, he drew off from
me to the opp