“Footpads and knaves”

From Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977), the first of three volumes recounting the writer’s 1933–1934 walk across Europe. In Vienna, Leigh Fermor meets up with a man named Konrad, a pastor’s son whose command of English comes largely from reading Shakespeare:

“We must beware,“ he said. “Among good and luckless men there is no lack of base ones, footpads and knaves who never shrink from purloining. Some love to filch.”

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[In a month I’ve traveled only forty pages. Too much else to do.]