Blackmore, in “Lorna Doone,” laid hands upon the old Faggus legends, as upon many others, and worked them into his story; but the redoubtable Tom was a real person, although more than a mere touch of the marvellous has been given in folk-lore to his career; so that he seems a creature compact of Dick Turpin and Robin Hood, in equal parts. He was a native of North Molton, and a blacksmith by trade. Ruined in a vindictive lawsuit brought against him by Sir Richard Bampfylde, he was obliged to leave his home, and then turned “gentleman robber.” That odd description would appear in his case both to mean that he robbed gentlemen only and that his own status was that of a gentleman. It is a quaint rustic valuation, and seems to have been based upon the belief that he was a champion of the poor against the rich; that he doubled, as it were, the parts of highwayman and relieving officer. His exploits long ago became, by dint of much oral repetition around the old cottage inglenooks, quite Homeric, and his enchanted “strawberry horse” figures as fiendishly intelligent, trampling the enemies of Faggus with hoofs and savaging them with teeth, like a devil incarnate. On one occasion Faggus was recognised in Barnstaple and pursued to the bridge, whereon he and his strawberry horse were cleverly caught by the watch posted at either end. But the highwayman was still more clever. He put his steed to the parapet, cleared it and swam off safely downstream. Faggus was at last captured at Porlock and his famous horse shot; himself finally being hanged at Taunton. There will be no more Fagguses in North Devon and no more Doones; for the conditions that produced them are dead, and legends such as those that were told and retold of them around the farmhouse inglenooks on winter evenings--and that with every re-telling gained some fresh marvel--no longer form the entertainment of the farmers’ men. All the rustics can read now: the maids burning the midnight candle over novelettes, the men addling their brains over the rag-bag weeklies, whose success with the million you perceive exemplified in the pioneer instance writ large at Lynton. So the old stories that were handed down from one generation to another have come to an end with the last surviving of the illiterates, and the only people who remember the simple folk songs are the occasional old men who may now and then be induced to sing them, in a quavering voice, for collectors of such things to write down before their final disappearance. Such a song was the following record of some feckless person, whose every bargain was a bad one, finally bringing disaster. Where and when it originated, who shall say? With slight variations, and with different choruses, the identical song is found in all parts of rustic England; a kind of rural classic: