he come backed by a company of musketeers.’ Another of our most virtuous crew had been a highwayman, and used to infest Gradshill, particularly after a ship had been paid off at Chatham, and the seamen came swarming up on the London road to expend their money in town debauchery. Having been apprehended sleeping in an inn on the borders of Epping Forest, where it seems he sometimes lay in wait for Cambridge scholars journeying past, a prosecutor was found to come forward against him at Newgate in very curious fashion. He told me the story himself. ‘There were six of us,’ quoth he, ‘and they had suspicions against all, but no witnesses. The fact was, that they knew very well that we had walked Watling Street, and perhaps other roads also, but they could find no one to prove it. So this was the plan the lawyers hit on. They published a notice in the _London Gazette_, to say, that six persons, reputed highwaymen, would be publicly exhibited in Newgate, dressed in riding suits, and just as they appeared on the road, so that any one who had been recently robbed might be able to tell whether the thief was in the clutches of the law. So the day came, and we were made, every man of us, to don our riding gear, and then with boot and red doublet, pistols at our belts, and just a morsel of crape dangling from our hats, we were paraded up and down the long galleries, while a crowd of ladies and court gallants examined us with their glasses, and joked and laughed and coquetted, and told us to turn, first one way and then the other, and said, as each passed by, “No, no, he is not the fellow who robbed me; bring up the next, good master turnkey, and make him turn well round, so that we may see his face to our satisfaction.” It would have been very well, however, if all the remarks had been like these. But, one by one, my poor companions were marked out and carried away. “Here be the very man who eased me of my purse on Gadshill,” quoth a fat grazier of Kent, and stout Tom Clinch was straightway taken to the hold.’ “O’ my life, the rascal who stopped her ladyship’s carriage on Hounslow, and made us all hand over watches and cash,” says a mincing carpet knight, and the fate of brave Moonlight Dick was settled. Even thus our misdeeds came home to us; so that in the space of an hour and a half I stood alone, and then, the crowd of spectators beginning to disperse, I had good hope that my lucky stars would prevail, and that I would be allowed to go forth for lack of evidence. But alas! in the nick of time, just as the captain of Newgate was thinking of turning me adrift with a kick and an oath, up there trips a dainty gentlewoman, whose face I knew in an instant, for I had said some few flattering words in praise of the brilliancy of her eyes, and what not, to which she listened nothing loath, while I conveyed to my own pouch a golden locket she wore, filled with hair, which I warrant you grew never on the bald head of her spouse, an old lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn.