Where is the permanent quality? Perhaps it is murder isolated, set exactly in the light which means and belongs to murder, in the atmosphere in which all imagination of murderers moves and hides. It was at night, it was in a wild place, with the horror of a great height about it; the corpse was stripped, the man was nameless. He was a sailor, walking from London to Portsmouth on September 23rd, 1786, to look for a job. He had money in his pocket; at Esher he fell in with three men, also on the road to Portsmouth, but without money; he paid for food and drink and lodging for them, and he was last seen alive with them at the Red Lion near Thursley. Perhaps the men were followed--one account says they were watched--perhaps the finding of the body was by chance. Two cottagers, coming after them over the highest stretch of the hill, saw below them, white in the dim light, on the slope of the Punch Bowl round which the road runs, the dead body as they thought of a sheep. One climbed down and saw what it was. Pursuers rushed down the road at Sheet, near Petersfield, the three were caught, trying to sell the dead man's clothes. They were tried at Kingston, and hanged in chains on the highest point of Hindhead; and there their bodies swung in the wind over every coach that drove from London to Portsmouth. The old Portsmouth road ran over the summit of the hill. The new road, cut in 1826, winds lower down, and on the lower road the stone stands to commemorate the crime. It was moved by the Ordnance Survey from the higher ground, heedless of the warning engraved on it. On one side runs the inscription:-- ERECTED In Detestation of a barbarous Murder Committed here on an unknown Sailor, On Sep^r. 24^th, 1786, By Edw^d. Lonegan, Michael Casey, and Ja^s. Marshall, Who were all taken the same day, And hung in Chains near this place. The back of the stone informs us that it was erected by order and at the cost of James Stillwell, of Cosford, 1786, and that he lays a curse on "the man who injureth or removeth this stone." However, that had no effect on the Ordnance Surveyors. The gibbet stood for years. Gilbert White writes to Thomas Barker from Selborne on New Year's Day, 1791:-- The thunder storm on Dec. 23 in the morning before day was very aweful: but, I thank God, it did not do us the least harm. Two millers, in a wind-mill on the Sussex downs near Good-wood, were struck dead by lightning that morning; and part of the gibbet on Hind-head, on which two murderers were suspended, was beaten down. Local art has depicted the scene; four original oil-paintings grace the walls of the Huts Hotel. Than the drawing of the stage-coach in full gallop up to the gibbet in the dead of night, nothing could be well more frightful.