Transcriber's Notes: 1. Page scan source: Web Archive: https://archive.org/details/06793116.2602.emory.edu 2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe]. 3. The source book had two chapters titled "Chapter XXIV". The second one was changed to "Chapter XXV". THE ROBBER, A TALE. BY G. P. R. JAMES, AUTHOR OF "RICHELIEU," "GIPSY," ETC. "More should I question thee, and more I must---- Enough more to know would not be more to trust---- From whence thou cam'st, how tended on. But rest Unquestioned, welcome; and undoubted, blest." _A NEW EDITION_. LONDON: GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, THE BROADWAY, LUDGATE. NEW YORK: 416, BROOME STREET. THE ROBBER. CHAPTER I. It was in the olden time of _merry England_--not at that far removes period when our native land first received its jocund name from the bowmen of Sherwood, and when the yeoman or the franklin, who had wandered after some knightly banner to the plains of the Holy Land, looked back upon the little island of his birth with forgetfulness of all but its cheerful hearths and happy days. Oh, no! it was in a far later age, when, notwithstanding wars and civil contentions not long past by, our country still deserved the name of merry England, and received it constantly amongst a class peculiarly its own. That class was the "good old country gentleman," an antediluvian animal swallowed up and exterminated by the deluge of modern improvements, and whose very bones are now being ground to dust by railroads and steam-carriages. Nevertheless, in that being there was much to wonder at as well as much to admire; and the inimitable song which commemorates its existence does not more than justice to the extinct race. It was in the days of Walton and Cotton, then or somewhere thereabouts (for it is unnecessary in a tale purely domestic, to fix the date to a year), that the events which we are about to narrate, took place, and the scene is entirely in _merry England_.