Mr. Nuthall, the Earl of Chatham's solicitor, too, who had been to Bath to confer with his gouty and irascible client, was stopped in his carriage as it was going towards London across this dreaded wilderness. The highwaymen fired at him, and he died of fright. Two other notable murders by highwaymen took place here--in 1798 and 1802--and bear witness to the degeneracy of the craft. The first was Mr. Mellish, who was fired upon and killed as he was returning from a run with the King's hounds. A Mr. Steele was the other victim, and his assailants, Haggarty and Holloway, who had planned the crime at the "Turk's Head," Dyot Street, Holborn, it is satisfactory to be able to add, were hanged. The execution took place at the Old Bailey, when twenty-eight persons among the crowds who had come to see the sight were crushed to death. Up to the year 1800, the Heath was a most famous place for gibbets. "The road," as a writer of the period says, "was literally lined with gibbets on which the carcases of malefactors hung in irons, blackening in the sun." Du Vall had a successor in Twysden, Bishop of Raphoe, collecting tithes in rather a promiscuous way, by turning highwayman in 1752. His career was a short one, for one of the first travellers he bade "Stand!" on the Heath shot him through the body, from which he died a few days later, at the house of a friend, from "inflammation of the bowels," as the contemporary report, jealous for the reputation of the dignified clergy, put it. Shall I weary you by recounting more of these highway crimes? There was Dr. Shelton, a surgeon, who flourished in the early thirties of last century, and, deserting lancet and scalpel, took to the road and that not more lethal weapon, the horse-pistol; though, to be sure, it was more for show than use, for not Du Vall himself could have been more courteous. That the poet who wrote of Bagshot Heath as a place "where ruined gamblers oft repay their loss" might with perfect propriety have substituted "Hounslow" will be readily seen when we mention Parsons, nearly contemporary with Shelton, who robbed at Hounslow that he might gamble in London. Parsons was the son of a "Bart. of the B.K.," as the Tichborne Claimant would have phrased it; an Eton boy, at one time an officer both in the Army and Navy, and the husband of a beautiful heiress. He made an edifying end at Tyburn.