[Illustration: WHITNEY HUGGED BY THE BEAR.]
Whitney cried out that he could not get away, and he believed the devil himself had hold of him.
"If it _is_ the old boy," rejoined his master, with a chuckle, "bring him out. I should like to see what kind of an animal he is."
But Whitney's evident terror and distress soon brought him to the rescue, and the bear was made to release her prey.
Before Whitney had served his full time with the butcher, his master cashiered him for idleness. After some little intervening time he became landlord of a small inn at Cheshunt. He was ever, says the author of _The Jacobite Robber_, a passionate admirer of good eating and drinking, especially at other people's expense. The inn, says our author, was the "Bell" or the "White Bear," he would not be sure which. If the "Bell," it was a sign he should presently make a noise over all England; if the "White Bear," a token that the landlord was of as savage a nature as any wild beast.
As a matter of fact, it appears to have been the "George"; but what significance may be extracted from that I do not know.
The inn did not pay its way on legitimate trading, and the people of Cheshunt wondered how Whitney could keep the pot boiling. Yet they need not have wondered, while they could see and hear, three or four times a week, a knot of roaring gentlemen, who sang, drank, swore, and revelled, the landlord himself joining in, until it seemed as if the place were thronged with old Lucifer and his club-footed emissaries. These guests were, in fact, highwaymen, as any one might have perceived, from their extravagant living and the unseasonable hours they kept.
At first Whitney had no hand in his customers' doings. As the quaint author of the tract already referred to says:
"It seems the conscientious Mr. Whitney, for all he was a well-wisher to the mathematicks and a friend to the tribe, did not at first care to expose his own dear person on the road; not that any one can justly tax him at the same time with cowardice, or want of valour (for had he been as plentifully stock'd with grace as he was with valour, he had never taken that employment upon him); but he prudently considered with himself that at present he ran no Risque of hanging for harbouring such people, and besides made a comfortable penny of them: Whereas, should he trade for himself, and scour the Highways to the Tune of _Dammee, Stand and Deliver_, he must certainly at one time or another make a Pilgrimage to _Tybourn_, and swinging in a Rope he had a Mortal Aversion to, because his Prophetical Grand-Mother had formerly told him it was a dry sort of a death.