The palmy days of the highwayman were before 1797, the year of Pitt’s Act for Restricting Cash Payments. Before then, travellers carried nothing but gold, and as they required plenty of that commodity on their long and tedious journeys, the booty seized by these gentry was often considerable. Bank notes then came into favour, and were issued for as low a denomination as one pound. These would have been a perilous kind of plunder, and accordingly as they grew popular, so did the certainty of a good haul from coaches and post-chaises diminish, until panics came, banks failed, and paper money became for a time a discredited form of currency. By that time the roads were better patrolled, and coin was to be conjured from the pockets of the lieges with less safety than before. From these causes, and from the new law which made it penal to receive stolen goods as well as to steal them, we may date the decadence of a great industry, now utterly vanished from the roads. XII [Picture: “The Whetstone”] WHETSTONE, coming next after the Finchleys, is held in local legends to have acquired its name from the battered old stone still to be seen embedded in the ground by the signpost of the “Griffin” inn. On it the men-at-arms are said to have whetted their swords and spears before the battle of Barnet. The sceptical smile at this antiquity, and for their benefit there is a rival legend which gives the date as that of 1745, when King George’s army marched down to meet Prince Charles and his Highlanders. Antiquaries have often demolished this derivation of the place-name; but the hoary (and quite unveracious) tale survives, and is doubtless immortal. You may explain it away, but the stone is there, and your local patriot is ever a materialist in such a resort. It is a straggling, broad-streeted village, with a breadth implying the originally small value of the land, and encroachments here and there upon the old building-line proving both the implication and the fact that, many years ago, there were those who, having the foreknowledge of a coming betterment, and more daring than their neighbours, grabbed while they might. Many inns, laundries, dairy-farms, great black-timbered barns, and a few rotting hoardings and unfinished houses make up the long street and tell alike of a vanished rusticity and of an arrested development. Chaplin, the great coach-proprietor, had large stables here, his first stage out of London on the northern roads. They were placed here, rather than at Barnet, in order to avoid expenses at Whetstone Gate, situated down the road, near Greenhill Cross. Whetstone Gate gave travellers going north the welcome intelligence that they had finally passed Finchley Common and come to the better roads and more reputable society of Barnet, where they were safe from highwaymen.