I50 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



be especially distinguished, I should be inclined, I think, 

 to call it the Road of Assassination. And it will be 

 found to have claim to the title. Apart from Felton's 

 successful operation on the Duke of Buckingham at 

 Portsmouth in 1628, which marks the terminus with a 

 red letter ; and the barbarous doing away of the 

 unknown sailor on September 4th, 1786, which has 

 made the weird tract of liindhead haunted ; the beau- 

 tiful country between Rowland's Castle and Rake Hill 

 yields an especially prime horror. For here was enacted 

 at the latter end of the last century that protracted 

 piece of fiendish brutality known as the " Murder by the 

 Smugglers," an atrocity which was spun out over eleven 

 miles of ground, which out-Newgates anything of the 

 kind to be found in the Newgate Calendar, and of which 

 I shall have more to say when I get to the scene of its 

 commission. Here meanwhile we have three good juic)- 

 murders in seventy-one miles, seven furlongs — the dis- 

 tance from the Stone's ILnd, Borough, Surre}^ to 

 Portsmouth ; and that is a fair average of crime for 

 mileage, as I think most people will admit. 



The old Portsmouth Road, as appears above, is mea- 

 sured from the Surrey side of the water ; and it was 

 from the Surrey side that old-fashioned visitors to 

 Portsmouth started. Pep}'s, in 1668, having received 

 orders to go down to Portsmouth in his official capacity, 

 and having gone through the usual formalities of going 

 to bed, waking betimes, &c., &c., discovered suddenly 

 that his wife (who no doubt suspected junketings on 

 the part of the susceptible Samuel) had resolved at an 

 hour's warning to go too. So Samuel first of all sent 

 her mentally to the deuce, and then to Lambeth, where 

 she embarked in a coach. Samuel, after having ad- 

 journed to St. James's and remarked " God be with 

 you " to a Mr. Wren (who surely ought to have remarked 

 it to Samuel, considering the state of the Portsmouth 

 Road), went over the water to what he calls P^ox Plall, 

 where he ingeniously intercepted the coach containing" 



