Now the woods are drawing near, and we cross the old London road, the high-road between the metropolis and Southampton, along which ninety stagecoaches ran every day in the good old times. A mile off to our right, down Star Hill, lies the famous White Lion Inn, now a miserable pot-house, where George IV. used to stay, and where, on the day that the London and South-western Railway was opened, the old ostler cut his throat in sheer despair, for Othello's occupation was gone. Ten miles up the road lies Bagshot Heath, the terror of travellers in those coaching days. There stood, and stands still, a little wayside inn called the Golden Farmer, where many of the coaches stopped to water the horses. The wearied travellers of the end of last century, touched by the tender solicitude of the charming landlord, confided to his sympathetic ear their fears of the highwaymen who were said to infest the heath. Cheered and encouraged with assurances from their host of the perfect safety of the particular road they intended taking, the travellers set out. But usually, when they had gone about a mile, the coach would stop with a sudden jerk, and a masked man on a magnificent horse would ride up, pistol in hand, and demand their money or their life. Sometimes serious encounters took place with this leader and his band, and then the wounded and terrified victims would drag themselves back to the Golden Farmer, where the host, full of commiseration for their misfortunes, would lavish care and kindness upon them. This went on for years, and it was not until hundreds of robberies had been committed that the discovery was made of the identity of the fascinating landlord and the desperate captain of the highwaymen. Many are the tales the old people at Eversley used to tell of the "gentlemen of the road" in their fathers' and grandfathers' time. Even in quiet Eversley itself a curate lived some hundred years ago whose strange career ended on the gallows. He owned a splendid black horse which no one ever saw him mount. But it was whispered that if any one peeped into its stable in the morning the beautiful creature was seen covered with foam, bathed in perspiration, trembling as if it had just come in from a long gallop; and at last it was found out that Parson Darby belonged to the gang of highwaymen on Bagshot Heath. He was caught red-handed, and hanged close to the Golden Farmer in chains on a gibbet of which the posts were still standing forty years ago. But what became of his black horse no one ever could tell me. Now the London road is as safe and quiet as any other well-kept highway, and the wildest passengers upon it are a few wandering gypsies, who travel up and down it from fair to race and from race to fair.