rious among housebreakers, singing psalms in all good
faith.

But if Peace was incomparably the better craftsman, Brodie was the
prettier gentleman. Peace would not have permitted Brodie to drive his
pony-trap the length of Evelina Road. But Brodie, in revenge, would
have cut Peace had he met him in the Corn-market. The one was a sombre
savage, the other a jovial comrade, and it was a witty freak of fortune
that impelled both to follow the same trade. And thus you arrive at
another point of difference. The Englishman had no intelligence of
life's amenity. He knew naught of costume: clothes were the limit of
his ambition. Dressed always for work, he was like the caterpillar which
assumes the green of the leaf, wherein it hides: he wore only such duds
as should attract the smallest notice, and separate him as far as might
be from his business. But the Scot was as fine a dandy as ever took
(haphazard) to the cracking of kens. If his refinement permitted
no excess of splendour, he went ever gloriously and appropriately
apparelled. He was well-mannered, cultured, with scarce a touch of
provincialism to mar his gay demeanour: whereas Peace knew little
enough outside the practice of burglary, and the proper handling of the
revolver.

Our Charles, for example, could neither spell nor write; he dissembled
his low origin with the utmost difficulty, and at the best was plastered
over (when not at work) with the parochialism of the suburbs. So far the
contrast is complete; and even in their similarities there is an evident
difference. Each led a double life; but while Brodie was most himself
among his own kind, the real Peace was to be found not fiddle-scraping
in Evelina Road but marking down policemen in the dusky byways
of Blackheath. Brodie's grandeur was natural to him; Peace's
respectability, so far as it transcended the man's origin, was a cloak
of villainy.

Each, again, was an inventor, and while the more innocent Brodie
designed a gallows, the more hardened Peace would have gained notoriety
by the raising of wrecks and the patronage of Mr. Plimsoll. And since
both preserved a certain courage to the end, since both died on the
scaffold as becomes a man, the contrast is once more characteristic.
Brodie's cynicism is a fine foil to the piety of Peace; and while each
end was natural after its own fashion, there is none who will deny to
the Scot the finer sense of fitness. Nor did any step in their career
explain more clea