Jerry Abershawe was a hero of this stamp, only he did not make his last appearance on so fashionable a stage as Tyburn. Croydon was the scene of his trial, and Wandsworth, as we have seen, was the place of his taking off. Two other highwaymen--William Brown and Joseph Witlock--who were both hanged at Tyburn in 1773, for house-breaking, haunted the neighbourhood of Putney Heath and Kingston, and robbed solitary pedestrians or children. They were not of the fine flower of their profession, as one may judge from the evidence given at their trial, by which it appeared that they laid in wait for topers in wayside taverns, and robbed them upon their coming out in a more or less helpless state. Two convivial fellows whom they had seen carousing in the "Green Man" they waited for, and having tied their hands behind their backs, relieved them of some twenty guineas, together with such small odds and ends as knives and tobacco-boxes. A little way further on, upon this occasion, they chanced upon a baker's boy, and disdaining not even the merest trifles, they "persuaded" him to hand over a few halfpence and a silver buckle he was carrying in a bag. [Illustration: THE WINDMILL, WIMBLEDON COMMON.] [Sidenote: _THE DUELLO_] But Putney Heath and the adjoining Wimbledon Common were not notorious only for highwaymen and footpads: they were the favourite meeting-grounds of belligerent gentlemen with an exaggerated and altogether mistaken idea of honour, who faced one another armed with swords or pistols, and fought duels at an early hour of the morning, when courage was apt to be insufficiently warmed. Their notions of honour and "satisfaction" were, possibly, somewhat ridiculous, but it seems to me that a man who would get up at an unearthly hour of the morning, perhaps in the coldest of weather, to shoot at a fellow-creature, or to be shot at by him,--to be run through the body with a rapier, or else to run his opponent through some vital part,--must have been either singularly courageous or peculiarly vindictive.