refuge from the necessity of living by instruction
of the young, domestic service, or the
needle.

CASE FOR THE PROSECUTION.

I WAS staying out of town by the sea,
where I always do my own marketing; and,
as the butterman made a little funnel of paper
in which to enclose my two new laid eggs, I
saw a roll of yellow manuscript in faded ink
lying in the drawer. " What's that?" I asked.
"Waste," he replied. "May I look at it?"
"Welcome;" and he brought it out. A large
roll of extra-size law-paper, marked outside,
"Old Bailey, July Session, 1782, Middlesex.
The King against George Weston and Joseph
Weston, for felony. Brief for the prosecutor."

"Where did you get this?" I asked. " Come
with the rest," he said; " pounds of it down
stairs; nigh enough to fill my back cellar!"
It was very tempting. I had no books save
the half-dozen I had brought with me, and
which I knew by heart; the evenings were
dull and showery; I was getting horribly
bored for want of something to read. "Will
you sell me this roll of paper?" said I.
"No; I'll gie 'em to ye," was his spirited
response.

I carried the roll of paper home, and saw my
landlady glance at it with undisguised horror as
she observed it under my arm. Then, after I
had dined, and the evening, as usual, had turned
out showery, and nobody was left on the esplanade
save the preventive man, wrapped in his
oilskin, coat, wearing his sou'-wester hat, and
always looking through his telescope for
some thing which never arrived, I lighted my reading
candles, feathery with the corpses of self-immolated
moths, and proceeded to look over my
newly-found treasure. Very old, very yellow,
very flyblown. Here is the heading of the
first side: " Old Bailey. July Session, 1782.
For Felony. Brief for the prosecution" (each
item underscored), in the left hand corner.
In the right hand, and kept together by a pen
and ink coupling figure, " The King—— " (so
grand that they could not put anybody else in
the same line, and are obliged to fill it up with
a long stroke) " against George Weston, o'rwise
Samuel Watson, and Joseph Weston, o'rwise
Joseph Williams Weston, o'rwise William Johnson."
Then follow six-and-twenty counts of
indictment, and then comes the " case" whence
I cull the facts of the story I am about to
tell.

Between two and three o'clock on the morning
of Monday, the 29th of January, 1781, the mail-
cart bringing what was called the Bristol mail,
with which it had been laden at Maidenhead,
and which it should eventually have deposited
at the London General Post-office, then in
Lombard-street, was jogging easily along towards
Cranford Bridge, between the eleventh and
twelfth milestone, when the postboy, a sleepy-
headed and sickly young fellow (he died very
shortly after the robbery), was wakened by the
sudden stopping of his horses. Opening his eyes,
he found himself confronted by a single
highwayman, who presented a pistol at his head, and
bade him get down from the cart. Half asleep,
and considerably more than half terrified, the
boy obeyed, slipped down, and glared vacantly
about him. The robber, seeing some indecision
in his young friend's face, kindly recalled him to
himself by touching his forehead with the cold
barrel of the pistol, then ordered him to
return back towards Cranford Bridge, and not to
look round if he valued his life. Such a
store did the poor boy place upon this
commodity, which even then was daily slipping
from him, that he implicitly obeyed the
robber's directions, and never turned his head
until he reached the post-office at Hounslow,
where he made up for lost time by giving a
lusty alarm.

Hounslow Heath being at that time a very
favoured spot for highway robberies, it was
by no means uncommon for the denizens of
Hounslow town to be roused out of their
beds with stories of attack. On this occasion,
finding that the robbers had had the impudence
to lay their sacrilegious hands on his Majesty's
mail, the Hounslowians turned out with a will,
and were speedily scouring the country in
different directions. Those who went towards the
place where the boy had been stopped, hit upon
the right scent. They tracked the wheels of the
cart on the road leading from the great high
road to Heston, and thence to the Uxbridge
road, a short distance along that road towards
London, and then along a branch road to the
left leading to Ealing Common, about a mile
from which, in a field at a distance of eight or
ten miles from where the boy was robbed, lay
the mail cart, thrown on its side and gutted of
its contents. The bags from Bath and Bristol
for London had been rifled, many of the letters
had been broken open, the contents taken away,
and the outside covers were blowing about the
field. About twenty-eight letter-bags had been
carried off bodily; some distance down the
field was found the Reading letter-bag, rifled of
its contents. Expresses were at once sent off
to head-quarters, consternation in the City was
very great, and advertisements, giving an account
of the robbery and offering a reward, were
immediately printed and distributed throughout
the kingdom.

About nine o'clock on Tuesday morning, the
30th of January (before any account of the
robbery could have arrived at Nottingham), a
post-chaise rattled into the yard of the Black
Moor's Head in that town, and a gentleman in
a naval uniform alighted and requested to be
shown to a room. In this room he had scarcely
settled himself, before he rang the bell, and
despatched the waiter to the bank of Messrs.
Smith to obtain cash for several Bristol bills
which he handed to him. Messrs. Smith
declining these bills without some further statement,
the gentleman in the naval uniform started