"Never again, I fancy!" laughed Charlie. "My friend, you have
saved a lot of poor devils a deal of trouble. From this time on
none of us will ever need to tap wires. After this we shall only
_pretend_ to tap 'em."

"How so?" I inquired, dropping into a near-by chair.

"Why, under the new law," responded Billington--"the law of which,
I may say, you are the creator--we shall only have to induce some
innocent countryman to believe that he has heard the result of a
horse-race being sent over the wire in advance of the pool rooms,
and persuade him to turn over his roll for the purpose of betting
it on a horse that is presumably already cooling off in the paddock
and we can keep his money, for he has parted with it for an illegal
or an inimical purpose--to wit, cheating the bookies."

"Not with my sanction!" I retorted, somewhat aghast at the idea of
having paved a broad and easy path for the way of criminals.

"Tut, tut, Quib!" said Gottlieb. "You have nothing to do with what
use our friend here sees fit to put your law to. I have never yet
advised any man how to do an illegal thing. The most I have ever
done has been to show some of my clients how to do in a perfectly
legal manner that which had heretofore been unlawful."

"Yea, Gottlieb," remarked Billington. "And many things that before
were accounted faults have now, thanks to you, become virtues."

After Billington bade us good-night, Gottlieb said to me:

"Quib, the more I think of it, the more astonishing is the result
of this new doctrine of yours that has been sanctified by the Court
of Appeals. I do not for the life of me see how a seller of 'green
goods' can be prosecuted. The countryman comes to the city for
the purpose of buying counterfeit money at a ridiculously low
figure. He puts up his money and gets a package of blank paper
with a genuine one-dollar bill on top of it. What good will it do
him to appeal to the police? Has he not parted with his money
avowedly for a most wicked purpose--that of uttering counterfeit
bills?"

"I quite agree with you," I answered. "There seems to be no escape
from your result; and I, for one, do not see what is to prevent
New York from becoming the Mecca of all the thieves and rogues in
the country."

And such, indeed, it became. From this time on, until very recently,
the metropolis was the stamping ground of all the rogues who could
not earn a dishonest living elsewhere. With our friend Charles as