I retreated a few steps, yet without turning to flee.  I was not, however, without apprehension, which, indeed, the appearance of these two people was well calculated to inspire:  the woman was a stout figure, seemingly between thirty and forty; she wore no cap, and her long hair fell on either side of her head like horse-tails half-way down her waist; her skin was dark and swarthy, like that of a toad, and the expression of her countenance was particularly evil; her arms were bare, and her bosom was but half concealed by a slight bodice, below which she wore a coarse petticoat, her only other article of dress.  The man was somewhat younger, but of a figure equally wild; his frame was long and lathy, but his arms were remarkably short, his neck was rather bent, he squinted slightly, and his mouth was much awry; his complexion was dark, but, unlike that of the woman, was more ruddy than livid; there was a deep scar on his cheek, something like the impression of a halfpenny.  The dress was quite in keeping with the figure:  in his hat, which was slightly peaked, was stuck a peacock’s feather; over a waistcoat of hide, untanned and with the hair upon it, he wore a rough jerkin of russet hue; smallclothes of leather, which had probably once belonged to a soldier, but with which pipeclay did not seem to have come in contact for many a year, protected his lower man as far as the knee; his legs were cased in long stockings of blue worsted, and on his shoes he wore immense old-fashioned buckles.

Such were the two beings who now came rushing upon me; the man was rather in advance, brandishing a ladle in his hand.

‘So I have caught you at last,’ said he; ’I’ll teach ye, you young highwayman, to come skulking about my properties!’

Young as I was, I remarked that his manner of speaking was different from that of any people with whom I had been in the habit of associating.  It was quite as strange as his appearance, and yet it nothing resembled the foreign English which I had been in the habit of hearing through the palisades of the prison; he could scarcely be a foreigner.

‘Your properties!’ said I; ’I am in the King’s Lane.  Why did you put them there, if you did not wish them to be seen?’

‘On the spy,’ said the woman, ’hey?  I’ll drown him in the sludge in the toad-pond over the hedge.’

‘So we will,’ said the man, ‘drown him anon in the mud!’

‘Drown me, will you?’ said I; ’I should like to see you!  What’s all this about?  Was it because I saw you with your hands full of straw plait, and my mother there—­’

‘Yes,’ said the woman; ‘what was I about?’

Myself.  How should I know?  Making bad money, perhaps!

And it will be as well here to observe, that at this time there was much bad money in circulation in the neighbourhood, generally supposed to be fabricated by the prisoners, so that this false coin and straw plait formed the standard subjects of conversation at Norman Cross.