all.

Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the

hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones

and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three

could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other

two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many

wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body,

of his two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of

being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road

might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when

every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in

“the Captain’s” pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable

nondescript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard

of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in

November, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five,

lumbering up Shooter’s Hill, as he stood on his own particular

perch behind the mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a

hand on the arm-chest before him, where a loaded blunderbuss

lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a

substratum of cutlass.

The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another

and t