See now from what trivial incidents great issues hang. The village postmaster chanced to be identical with the schoolmaster who had taught Turpin to write. He was a man of public spirit, and travelled to York and identified the prisoner there as the man who had been “wanted” for many crimes. It was on April 17th, 1739, in the thirty-fourth year of his age, that Dick Turpin was hanged on Knavesmire, York, and since then he has become very much of a hero: perhaps the sorriest, the most sordid and absolutely commonplace scoundrel that was ever raised on so undeserved a pedestal. No district was more affected by highwaymen in the old days than Hounslow Heath, and the fork of the roads, where the two great highways to Bath and Exeter set out upon their several courses at the west end of what was once Hounslow village and is now Hounslow town, used in those brave old days to be decorated with a permanent gibbet, rarely without its scarecrow occupant, in the shape of some tattered robber, strung up as a warning to his fellows. Prominent amongst many stories that belong to this stretch of country is that of the murder of Mr. Mellish, brother of the then Member of Parliament for Grimsby, on a night in 1798, when returning from a day’s hunting with the King’s Buckhounds in Windsor Forest. The carriage in which his party were seated was passing the lonely old beerhouse called the “Old Magpies,” at Sipson Green, at half-past eight, when it was attacked by three footpads. One held the horses’ heads, while the other two guarded the windows, firing a shot through them, to terrify the occupants. No resistance was offered to the demand for money, and purses and bank-notes were handed over, as a matter of course. Then the carriage was allowed to proceed, a parting shot being fired after it. That shot struck the unfortunate Mr. Mellish in the forehead, and he died shortly after being removed to an upper room in an adjoining inn, still standing, the “Three Magpies.” The older and more humble inn, heavily thatched and with a beetle-browed and sinister look, where the footpads had been drinking before the attack, makes a picture, in the melodramatic sort, on the Bath Road, even to-day. [Illustration: THE “OLD MAGPIES.”]