The Two Householders
Extract from the Memoirs of Gabriel Foot, Highwayman.
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I will say this — speaking as accurately as a man may, so long afterwards — that when first I spied the house it put no desire in me but just to give thanks.
For conceive my case. It was near mid-night, and ever since dusk I had been tramping the n***d moors, in the teeth of as vicious a nor’-wester as ever drenched a man to the skin, and then blew the cold home to his marrow. My clothes were sodden; my coat-tails flapped with a noise like pistol-shots; my boots squeaked as I went. Overhead, the October moon was in her last quarter, and might have been a slice of finger-nail for all the light she afforded. Two-thirds of the time the wrack blotted her out altogether; and I, with my stick clipped tight un
