he joined Wombwell's wild beast show and soon acquired some
reputation for his remarkable powers as a tamer of wild animals. About
this time Peace married at Rotherham the daughter of a surgeon in
the Navy. On the death of a favourite son to whom he had imparted
successfully the secrets of his wonderful control over wild beasts of
every kind, Mr. Peace gave up lion-taming and settled in Sheffield as a
shoemaker.

It was at Sheffield, in the county of Yorkshire, already famous in the
annals of crime as the county of John Nevison and Eugene Aram, that
Peace first saw the light. On May 14, 1832, there was born to John Peace
in Sheffield a son, Charles, the youngest of his family of four. When he
grew to boyhood Charles was sent to two schools near Sheffield, where
he soon made himself remarkable, not as a scholar, but for his singular
aptitude in a variety of other employments such as making paper models,
taming cats, constructing a peep-show, and throwing up a heavy ball of
shot which he would catch in a leather socket fixed on to his forehead.

The course of many famous men's lives has been changed by what appeared
at the time to be an unhappy accident. Who knows what may have been the
effect on Charles Peace's subsequent career of an accident he met with
in 1846 at some rolling mills, in which he was employed? A piece of red
hot steel entered his leg just below the knee, and after eighteen months
spent in the Sheffield Infirmary he left it a cripple for life. About
this time Peace's father died. Peace and his family were fond of
commemorating events of this kind in suitable verse; the death of John
Peace was celebrated in the following lines:

"In peace he lived;
In peace he died;
Life was our desire,
But God denied."

Of the circumstances that first led Peace to the commission of crime we
know nothing. How far enforced idleness, bad companionship, according to
some accounts the influence of a criminally disposed mother, how far
his own daring and adventurous temper provoked him to robbery, cannot
be determined accurately. His first exploit was the stealing of an old
gentleman's gold watch, but he soon passed to greater things. On October
26, 1851, the house of a lady living in Sheffield was broken into and a
quantity of her property stolen. Some of it was found in the possession
of Peace, and he was arrested. Owing no doubt to a good character for
honesty given him by his late employ