se it furnished his ready wit with
a capital contrivance to shift Beck's indignation from his own shoulders
to a party more liable to suspicion. He left the coral on the floor
near the bed, stole down the ladder, reached his own room, took up his
brief-bag, locked his door, slipped the key in the rat-hole, where the
trusty, plundered Beck alone could find it, and went boldly downstairs;
passing successively the doors within which still stormed the
resurrection-man, still wailed the child, still shrieked the Irish
shrew, he paused at the ground-floor occupied by Bill the cracksman and
his long-fingered, slender, quick-eyed imps, trained already to pass
through broken window-panes, on their precocious progress to the hulks.

The door was open, and gave a pleasant sight of the worthy family
within. Bill himself, a stout-looking fellow with a florid, jolly
countenance, and a pipe in his mouth, was sitting at his window, with
his brawny legs lolling on a table covered with the remains of a very
tolerable breakfast. Four small Bills were employed in certain sports
which, no doubt, according to the fashionable mode of education,
instilled useful lessons under the artful guise of playful amusement.
Against the wall, at one corner of the room, was affixed a row of bells,
from which were suspended exceedingly tempting apples by slender
wires. Two of the boys were engaged in the innocent entertainment of
extricating the apples without occasioning any alarm from the bells;
a third was amusing himself at a table, covered with mock rings and
trinkets, in a way that seemed really surprising; with the end of a
finger, dipped probably in some glutinous matter, he just touched one
of the gewgaws, and lo, it vanished!--vanished so magically that
the quickest eye could scarcely trace whither; sometimes up a cuff,
sometimes into a shoe,--here, there, anywhere, except back again upon
the table. The fourth, an urchin apparently about five years old,--he
might be much younger, judging from his stunted size; somewhat older,
judging from the vicious acuteness of his face,--on the floor under his
father's chair, was diving his little hand into the paternal pockets in
search for a marble sportively hidden in those capacious recesses.
On the rising geniuses around him Bill the cracksman looked, and his
father's heart was proud. Pausing at the threshold, Grabman looked in
and said cheerfully, "Good-day to you; good-day to you all, my little
dears."