The Happy Highwayman

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Thus somewhat optimistically spoke the editorial writer of the New York Daily Mail, on a certain morning in the beginning of the spring.

Simon Templar kept the cutting. He had a weakness for collecting the miscellaneous items of publicity with which the press punctuated his career from time to time. He had been publicly called a great many names in his life and they all interested him. To those who found themselves sadder or poorer or even deader by reason of his interference in their nefarious activities, he was an unprintable illegitimate; to those whose melancholy duty it was to discourage his blithe propensity for taking the law into his own hands, he was a perpetually disturbing problem; to a few people he was a hero; to himself he was only an adventurer, finding the best romance he could in a dull mechanical age, fighting crime because he had to fight something, and not caring too much whether he himself transgressed the law in doing so. Sometimes his adventures left him poorer, more often they left him richer; but always they were exciting. Which was all that the Saint asked of life.

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