The Potteries Examiner : — 1878-01-12 (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England)

CHAFTER XV. Ma forehead bled—he lay as dead— I wiped Ida streaming cheek; I would have given my heart's last drop If I could hear him ;lank. I called him by the dearest names, His sere; less lips I kissed ; I sought for water; I prayed to Heaven; I chafed his senseless wrist, And cursed, in my deep, deep agony, The gold fir which I'd slain A life that all the gold in the world Could user bring back again. Cha; Iv; Mackay,  I must now go back a little in my narrative in order to relate what became of the outlaw of the Peak, with whom Lionel's father had such a perilous and desperate encounter in Brad well Wood. My readers will remember how on Justice Adams, along with his tipstaves, sallying out and reaching—guided by Brereton—the spot where he had left the bandit stunned and bleeding on the treenaward, they found be had levanted ; spirited away by some of his outlawed and devoted band, who had been long in quest of him. Haber% their much admired chieftain, bade his  men on their discovery of him, to convey him to a I :lave on the banks of the tr ov e. Thither they bore him, here. a half sister of Molly Leigh's, who lived in w cottage hard by, all alone by herself. and who .was deep versed in the medicinal pro. perties of herbs, magic, gramarye, and all that elfish lerrimuce no rife in the outlandish ',militias of our • wintry, where I say this ',11i.: N 01111 in doctored and restored him to his wonted health, and antecedent strength. From there, on his serosary, he made his way to London, dismissing his faithful band, as the search for them was beCOM iilg, hotter and hotter every day. The authorities of the land went becoming more awake to their duties, and more sagacious and resolute in the work of hunting cut, and extirpating those lawless freebooters, who ranged the country like so many wild beasts of prey in search of their plunder. Around the lower end of Holborn and Fleet-street, in the narrow lane: and courts, between there and Bartholomew Close, these deeperadoes made their lairs. It was a dangerous task to follow them to earth—if I may be allowed the use of a rural hunting phrase in relation to city matters. Here they often set at defiance their legal pursuers when a robbery, and possibly a murder also,. had. been committed. . .  Whet the narrator in his boyhood was in the Mammoth city, nearly forty years ago, he saw on the pulling down of some old dilapidated buildings, at the bottom of Pleebstie..t, a cove.red way laid bare, along which subterranean passage the burglars and.felons of the latter part of the seventeenth and the commencement of the eighteenth century, were in the habit of retreating, thus eluding the pursuit of the guardians of the peace —the old parish constables and catehpoles of that • period. . It is to this haunt of the desperadoes and male• factors-of. kLat.titne that Robert the Devil betook hbuself and several of his gang.  Apprehended at last with several of his pals, for an appalling murder, be and they were tried, convicted, and hung, along with sundry others, at Tyburn, the Mount Golgotha of London akove a century ago. No uncommon thing was it in those days to hang as many as forty at a time. These were the dark days of our social and national history; just ere the Methodists of Oxford burst upon the world as the reformers of society, and the regenerators of an age that was fast ripening for a revolution. Thus I tragically dismiss one of the notorious characters who has transiently burst upon our panoramic surrey of the world as it was in Britain, nine and ten score years ago; days, let us hope, ..never to return again with their deeds of fearful . violence, and their scenes of lawless transgression.