Lord Brookwood is about to resume his conversation with Biggs, while the half-dozen grinning stable boys, behind His Lordship’s back, are rubbing their fists in the wet turf of a paddock, and smearing their red faces with the dew, the head-groom touching them up with a lash; when a whinny, that sets every animal in the stalls and out of ’em a-replying, sets all the cocks crowing, hens cackling, chicks peeping, dogs barking, geese squawking, smites their startled ears, and yonder, hilly-o-ho! Sirs; in a cloud of upturned soil, in a shower of splash from the river, with a thud on the wooden bridge, a bound over the stone wall of the kitchen garden; comes a black with nigh every tooth in its mouth bared, foaming, smoking, bloody; rider bent double to saddle’s bow, clinging with legs and arms. “Homing Nell and the highwayman! Tom Kidde! Tom Kidde!” “Homing Nell!” the shout goes up from every throat there, from His Lordship to the ’ostlers and boys. “Tom Kidde! Tom Kidde!” “By Gad! Sir,” cries the Earl. “I knew Nell’d come back sooner or later! Surround him. Bag him!” Peggy hears the shouts as the ungovernable steed lunges, lurches, rears beneath her spurs and still tightly gripped reins; she takes in the situation, but not to its full import, until she now hears the voice of Biggs uplifted. “Lord Brookwood! Lord Brookwood! mind her heels, My Lord, mind her heels! Leave the takin’ of the damned cut-purse to me and the boys!” At the word “Brookwood,” Her Ladyship realizes that she is on the domains of Lady Diana’s father! and being mistaken for a Knight of the Road! The latter she felt she could easily abide, and as easily refute; but the former was more than even her spent spirit could stand. So, as Biggs, His Lordship, the grooms, the stable-boys and ’ostlers and helpers all formed into a ring with whips, canes, stones and halloos to take her prisoner, she plucked up courage from the depths, and, raising herself in her saddle and her head in the air, with one superhuman tug at the bridle and prick with the steels, she made to get off! and away! But Her Ladyship’s nerve was not the equal of Homing Nell’s, nor yet to be pitted with success against the waving arms and jumping legs of a dozen stout men. With the final crack of the head-groom’s lash about her heels, with the pop in the air above her hat of Mr. Biggs’s blunderbuss, caught from the hand of one of the lads, “Homing Nell” was brought to a quivering stand-still, and My Lady Peggy to bay in the stable-yard of Brookwood Castle! “Ha!” cries the Earl, “my pretty fellow, you’re trapped at last! The night you stole the black mare from me I shouted after you, as well as the gag at my mouth would permit, that she’d bring you no luck, and that muscles of iron wouldn’t hold her the day she made up her mind to get home.”