eye one brigand had seized his horse and made him dismount, while the others covered him with their pistols. The servant also was secured, the guineas transferred with the dexterity of a practised conjurer, the horses turned loose, and then the three rode away, leaving the traveller and his servant to get on as best they could. Spiggott eventually paid the penalty of his rashness in not disguising himself in accordance with the canons of the hightoby craft, for when, a little later in his career, he was caught, with some others, in an attempt on the Wendover wagon at Tyburn, he was identified by the Finchley traveller. The end of him was the appointed end of all his kind. The moral of this story seems to be “Wear a mask when engaged in crime.” In 1774, Edmund Burke, travelling to Malton, in Yorkshire, was stopped here by two highwaymen, who robbed him of ten guineas, and his servant of his watch, in the most easy way. Some of these highwaymen were, indeed, persons who took their calling in an earnest and whole-hearted manner, and doubtless regarded Jack Sheppard as a mere scatterbrain, quite unfitted to be in business for himself. Thoroughly business-like men were Messrs. Everett and Williams, who entered into a duly drawn and properly attested deed of partnership, by which it was agreed that they should work together on Finchley Common and elsewhere and divide the profits of their labours into equal shares. Their industry prospered, and the common fund soon reached the very respectable total of £2,000. But when required to render accounts and to pay over half this amount, Mr. Williams refused; whereupon his partner brought an action-at-law against him, in 1725. A verdict for £20 was actually obtained, and appealed against by the defendant. The court then very properly found the matter scandalous, and sentenced Everett to pay costs, the solicitors engaged on either side being fined £50 each for their part in this discreditable affair. One partner was executed, two years later, at Maidstone, and the other at Tyburn, in 1730. There still exists an ancient oak by the road at a place called Brown’s Wells, at the corner of a lane nearly opposite the “Green Man,” and in the trunk of this last survival of the “good old days” there have been found, from time to time, quite a number of pistol bullets, said to have been fired by passing travellers at the trunk to frighten the highwaymen who might chance to be hiding behind it, under cover of the night. The tree itself has long borne the name of Turpin’s Oak, no less celebrated a person than the re-doubtable Dick himself having once frequented it. History fails to inform us who was the Brown after whom the Wells were named. I suggest they should be, and were in the first place “Brent Wells”; a source of the river Brent. Nor are those Wells—whatever they may have been—now in existence, while the name itself is only perpetuated by two or three old stuccoed villas beside the road.