The ‘Green Man’ at Hatton looks nowadays a guileless place, with no secrets, and yet it possesses behind that innocent exterior a veritable highwayman’s hiding-place. This retiring-place of modest worth, eager to escape from the embarrassing attentions of the outer world, may be seen by the curious traveller in the little bar-parlour on the left hand as you enter the front door. It is a narrow, low-ceiled room, with an old-fashioned fire-grate in it, filling what was once a huge chimney-corner. At the back of this grate is a hole leading to a passage which gives access to a cavernous nook in the thickness of the wall. Through this hole, decently covered at most times with an innocent-looking fire-back, crawled those exquisite knights of the road, what time the Bow Street runners were questing almost at their heels. And here, it is related, one of these fine fellows nearly revealed his presence while the officers of the law were refreshing themselves with a dram in that room. What with a cold in the head, and the accumulated soot and dust of his hiding-place, he could not help sneezing, although his very life depended on the question ‘To sneeze or not to sneeze.’ [Illustration: THE HIGHWAYMAN’S RETREAT, THE ‘GREEN MAN.’] The minions of the law were not so far gone in liquor but that they heard the muffled sound of that sneeze, and it took all the landlord’s eloquence to persuade them that it was the cat! [Sidenote: _MARKET GARDENS_] Where footpads and highwaymen lurked on the scrubby heath, and the troopers of King James the Second, sent here to overawe London, lay encamped, there stretch nowadays the broad market gardens, where in spring-time the yellow daffodils, and in early summer the wallflowers, are grown by the acre for Covent Garden and the delight of Londoners. Orchards and vast fields of vegetables take up almost all the rest of the reclaimed waste, and if the country for many miles be indeed as flat as, or flatter than, your hand, and with never a tree but the scraggy hedgerow elms that grow here in such fantastic shapes, why amends are made in the scent of the blossoms, the bounteous promise of nature, and in the free and open air that resounds with the gladsome shrilling of the lark.