We so rarely hear of a highwayman deriving from dishonest parents that, it would seem, even in the more adventurous centuries, ill-led lives were as a rule so short and sordid as to impress the children of those who led them with the idea that honesty was not only really, in the long run, the best policy, but that for evil courses there was no long run at all. Otherwise, the life of the highwayman, if not by any means, as a general rule, so gay as usually it was represented to be, was sufficiently full of that spice of excitement which to the youthful makes amends for much danger and discomfort, and sons might often have succeeded fathers in the liberal profession of highway robbery.
The boyhood of Jerry Abershaw has never been dragged from the obscurity that enwraps it. No slowly-budding flower he, but one that in one brief day flung open its petals. Or rather, in less flowery language, we learn nothing of the first steps that led him to the highway, and find him at the very first mention of his doings already a cool and assured character, robbing with impunity, and making one place in especial a spot to be dreaded. This was the hollow of Putney Bottom, through which the Portsmouth Road runs on its way to Kingston. The little Beverley Brook trickles by, to this day, in the hollow; and Combe Wood, whose thickets formed so convenient a lair for Abershaw, and a rallying-place for his gang, is still very much what it was then.
Abershaw was not, of course, the first to see the strategic value of the heath, and of such woody tangles as these, bordering the road for quite three miles; for we read in Ogilby's great book on the roads, published in 1675, of Kingston Hill, hard by as "not rarely infested with robbers"; and a gibbet long stood near at hand, to remind those robbers, and others who succeeded them, of their own probable fate. But, if by no means the first, or even the last, who practised here, he is easily the most famous, even though it be merely a pervasive fame, not crystallised into many anecdotes.
[Illustration: JERRY ABERSHAW ON PUTNEY HEATH.]
The "Bald Faced Stag," that then stood, a lonely tavern, by the roadside near the Beverley Brook, was a favourite meeting-place of Abershaw and his fellows. It was afterwards rebuilt, as a superior hostelry, in the days when the growth of travel and of coaching had rendered the old roadside accommodation insufficient. This later house may still be seen, standing nowadays as a private residence, with imposing pillared portico, by the way.