excitement below stairs, as above. While incidents like
these, arising out of drums and masquerades and parties at quadrille, were
passing at the west end of the town, heavy stage-coaches and scarce heavier
waggons were lumbering slowly towards the city, the coachmen, guard, and
passengers, armed to the teeth, and the coach - a day or so perhaps behind its
time, but that was nothing - despoiled by highwaymen; who made no scruple to
attack, alone and single-handed, a whole caravan of goods and men, and sometimes
shot a passenger or two, and were sometimes shot themselves, as the case might
be. On the morrow, rumours of this new act of daring on the road yielded matter
for a few hours' conversation through the town, and a Public Progress of some
fine gentleman (half drunk) to Tyburn, dressed in the newest fashion, and
damning the ordinary with unspeakable gallantry and grace, furnished to the
populace, at once a pleasant excitement and a wholesome and profound example.
    Among all the dangerous characters who, in such a state of society, prowled
and skulked in the metropolis at night, there was one man from whom many as
uncouth and fierce as he, shrunk with an involuntary dread. Who he was, or
whence he came, was a question often asked, but which none could answer. His
name was unknown, he had never been seen until within about eight days or
thereabouts, and was equally a stranger to the old ruffians, upon whose haunts
he ventured fearlessly, as to the young. He could be no spy, for he never
removed his slouched hat to look about him, entered into conversation with no
man, heeded nothing that passed, listened to no discourse, regarded nobody that
came or went. But so surely as the dead of night set in, so surely this man was
in the midst of the loose concourse in the night-cellar where outcasts of every
grade resorted; and there he sat till morning.
    He was not only a spectre at their licentious feasts; a something in the
midst of their revelry and riot that chilled and haunted them; but out of doors
he was the same. Directly it was dark, he was abroad - never in company with any
one, but always alone; never lingering or loitering, but always walking swiftly;
and looking (so they said who had seen him) over his shoulder from time to time,
and as he did so quickening his pace. In the fields, the lanes, the roads, in
all quarters of the town - east, west