id="div1Ref_36" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">XXXVI.

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.

The court and the country were at that period--with the present we have nothing to do--two completely distinct and separate climates; and while the wits and the libertines, the fops and the soldiers, the poets and the philosophers, of the reigns of Charles, James, William, and Anne, formed a world in which debauchery, vice, strife, evil passion, rage, jealousy, and hatred, seemed the only occupations of genius, and the true sphere for talent; while Oxford and Cambridge had their contentions, and vied with the capital in nourishing feuds and follies of their own; there was a calm and quiet world apart, amidst the shady brooks and sunny fields and dancing streams of merry England; a world which knew but little of the existence of the other, except when the vices, or follies, or crimes of the world of the court called upon the world of the country to resist the encroachments of its neighbour, and defend its own quiet prosperity.

From the peasant who tilled the glebe, and whistled to outsing the lark over his happy toil, up to the lord of the manor, the knight whose many ancestors had all been knights before him, the countrymen of England mingled hardly, if at all, with the world of the metropolis and of the court; except, indeed, when some aspiring spirit, filled with good viands and a fair conceit, raised his wishes to be knight of the shire, and sit in parliament amongst the more courtly of the land; or else when some borough sent its representative to the senate to bring down strange tales of London life and fresh fashions for the wives and daughters.

There was, indeed, a connecting link between the two states of being we have described, afforded by the old hereditary nobility of the land, many members of which still lingered by the ancestral hall, as yet unallured from the calm delights of rural life, and the dignified satisfaction of dwelling amongst their own people, even by all the amusements or luxuries of the capital. An annual visit to London, an appearance in the court of the sovereign and the house of peers, at certain times, varied the existence of this class of men; and neither liking, comprehending, nor esteeming the wits and foplings of the metropolis, they returned well pleased to hold their ancient state in the country, bearing renewed importance amongst the country gentlemen around, from this fresh visit to the fountain of all honours and distinctions.

Great, indeed, was their importance amongst their neighbours at times--far greater than we in the present day can well picture to ourselves; for independent of the consequence acquired by spending large incomes within a limited sphere, the feeling of feudal influence was not extinct, though the fact had become a nonentity; and the tenantry on a great man's estate looked up to him in those days with the greater veneration and devotion, because they were not compelled to do so. Above the tenantry, again, the squire and the magistrate, who not only owed a great part of their comfort in the county, their consideration with their neighbours, and their estimation in their own eyes, to the degree of favour in which they stood with the earl, the marquis, or the duke, but who might at any time be rendered uncomfortable and persecuted, if not oppressed, in case they forfeited his good graces, failed not to show their reverence for him on every legitimate occasion--and sometimes, perhaps, went a little further.

Thus, of the little hierarchy of the county, there was generally some nobleman as the chief, and from him it descended through baronets, lords of the manor, knights, justices, squires, and many an et cetera, down to the lowest class of all, who still looked up to that chief, and would tell the passer-by, with much solemn truth, that "the earl was quite a king in his own part of the world."

Amongst such classes, in such scenes, and at such a period, took place the events about to be described.

At the door of a small, neat country inn stood gazing forth a traveller, one clear bright morning in the end of the month of May. The hour was early: the matutinal servants of the house were scarcely up; and Molly, with mop and pail, was busily washing out the passage which was soon to be thickly strewn with clean yellow sand. The scene before the traveller's eyes was one on which it is pleasant to dwell; the centre street of a small country town, many miles from a great city. There were a few light clouds in the sky, but they did not interrupt the rays of the great orb of light, who was yet low down in the heaven; and the shadows of the manifold white houses, with their peaked gables turned across the street, forming a fanciful pattern on the ground; the yellow sunshine and the blue shade lying clear and distinct, except where a little fountain burst forth half way down the town, and mingled the two together.

It was, as I have said, a cool and pleasant scene for the eye to rest upon; and even the casements of the houses opposite, shaded by the close-drawn white curtain, gave an idea of calm and happy repose. The world within were all yet asleep: the toil, the anxiety, the care, the strife of active life, had not yet began.

The eye of the traveller rested upon the picture apparently well pleaded. It gazed contemplatively up the street to where the road had been made to take a turn, in order to avoid the brow of the gentle hill on which the town was built, and which, crowned with houses of pleasant irregularity, interrupted the further view in that direction; and then that eye turned downward to the place where the highway opened out into the country beyond, after passing over a small bright stream by a brick bridge of ancient date. Over the bridge was slowly wending at the same moment a long line of cattle, lowing as they went, forth to pasture, with a herd following in tuneful mood, and neither hurrying himself nor them. The stranger's eye rested on them for a single moment, but then roved on to the landscape which was spread out beyond the bridge, and on it he gazed as curiously as if he had been a painter.

On it, too, we must pause, for it has matter for our consideration. The centre of the picture presented a far view over a bright and smiling