re upon a lonely common, and a man on horseback was at
the window of the postchaise.

"Give us out that there box! and your money!" I heard him say in a very
gruff voice. O heavens! we were actually stopped by a highwayman! It
was delightful.

Mr Weston jumped at his pistols very quick. "Here's our money, you
scoundrel!" says he, and fired point-blank at the rogue's head.
Confusion! the pistol missed fire. He aimed the second, and again no
report followed!

"Some scoundrel has been tampering with these," says Mr Weston, aghast.

"Come," says Captain Macheath, "come, your--"

But the next word the fellow spoke was a frightful oath; for I took out
my little pistol, which was full of shot, and fired it into his face.
The man reeled, and I thought would have fallen out of his saddle. The
postillion, frightened, no doubt, clapped spurs to his horse, and began
to gallop. "Shan't we stop and take that rascal, sir?" said I to the
Doctor. On which Mr Weston gave a peevish kind of push at me, and
said, "No, no. It is getting quite dark. Let us push on." And,
indeed, the highwayman's horse had taken fright, and we could see him
galloping away across the common.

I was so elated to think that I, a little boy, had shot a live
highwayman, that I dare say I bragged outrageously of my action. We
set down Mr Weston at his {149} inn in the Borough, and crossed London
Bridge, and there I was in London at last. Yes, and that was the
Monument, and then we came to the Exchange, and yonder, yonder was St
Paul's. We went up Holborn, and so to Ormonde Street, where my patron
lived in a noble mansion; and where his wife, my lady Denis, received
me with a great deal of kindness. You may be sure the battle with the
highwayman was fought over again, and I got due credit from myself and
others for my gallantry.

(_Denis Duval_.)

CHARLES DICKENS 1812-1870

STORM

"Don't you think that," I asked the coachman, in the first stage out of
London, "a very remarkable sky? I don't remember to have seen one like
it."

"Nor I,--not equal to it," he replied. "That's wind, sir. There'll be
mischief done at sea, I expect, before long."

It was a murky confusion--here and there blotted with a colour like the
colour of the smoke from damp fuel--of flying clouds tossed up into
most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than
there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in
the earth, th