As Turpin was riding on Hounslow Heath,
A lawyer there he chanced for to meet,
Who said, ‘Kind sir, ain’t you afraid
Of Turpin, that mischievous blade?’
‘Oh! no, sir,’ says Turpin, ‘I’ve been more acute,
I’ve hidden my money all in my boot.’
‘And mine,’ says the lawyer, ‘the villain can’t find,
For I have sewed it into my cape behind.’
They rode till they came to the Powder Mill,
When Turpin bid the lawyer for to stand still.
‘Good sir,’ quoth he, ‘that cape must come off,
For my horse stands in need of a saddle-cloth.’
‘Ah, well,’ says the lawyer, ‘I’m very compliant,
I’ll put it all right with my next coming client.’
‘Then,’ says Turpin, ‘we’re both of a trade, never doubt it,
Only you rob by law, and I rob without it.’
The last vestige is gone of the bleak and barren aspect of the road, and even the singular memorial of a murder, which, according to the writer of a road-book published in 1802, stood near by, has vanished: ‘Upon a spot of Hounslow Heath, about a stone’s throw from the road, on leaving that village, a small wood monument is shockingly marked with a bloody hand and knife, and the following inscription: “Buried with a stake through his body here, the wicked murderer, John Pretor, who cut the throat of his wife and child, and poisoned himself, July 6, 1765.”’
XI
It is a splendidly surfaced road that runs hence to Staines, and the fact is sufficiently well known for it to be crowded on Saturday afternoons and Sundays with cyclists of the ‘scorcher’ variety, members of cycling clubs out for a holiday, and taking their pleasure at sixteen miles an hour, Indian file, hanging on to one another’s back wheel, with shoulders humped over handle-bars and eyes for nothing but the road surface.
HATTON
But there are quiet, deserted bye-lanes where these highway crowds never come. Just such a lane is that which leads off here, by the river Crane and the Bedfont Powder Mills, to the right, and makes for Hatton—‘Hatton-in-the-Hinterland,’ one might well call it.