"I dare say."
"If you had taken the left-hand road you would never have seen next morning."
"Why so?"
"There was a large cargo of 'run' goods being transported that night, and you would have met it."
"What of that?"
"What of that? You would have been chucked over the cliffs."
"But how could they suppose I would peach?"
"Sir! They'd ha' took good care you shouldn't a' had the chance!"
I was sitting in a little seaport tavern in Cornwall one winter's evening, over a great fire, with a company of very old "salts," gossiping, yarning, singing, when up got a tough old fellow with a face the colour of mahogany, and dark, piercing eyes, and the nose of a hawk. Planting his feet wide apart, as though on deck in a rolling sea, he began to sing in stentorian tones a folk-song relative to a highwayman in the old times, when Sir John Fielding, the blind magistrate at Westminster, put down highway robbery.
The ballad told of the evil deeds of this mounted robber of the highways, and of how he was captured by "Fielding's crew" and condemned to die. It concluded:--