men don't stand up for me, pass the article under their shawls, whisk
down the street with it, outbluster the policeman, and utter any amount
of fibs before Mr. Beak, those beings are not what I take them to be,
and--for a fortune--I won't give them so much as a bad half-crown.

Is conscious guilt a source of unmixed pain to the bosom which harbors
it? Has not your criminal, on the contrary, an excitement, an enjoyment
within quite unknown to you and me who never did anything wrong in
our lives? The housebreaker must snatch a fearful joy as he walks
unchallenged by the policeman with his sack full of spoons and tankards.
Do not cracksmen, when assembled together, entertain themselves with
stories of glorious old burglaries which they or bygone heroes have
committed? But that my age is mature and my habits formed, I should
really just like to try a little criminality. Fancy passing a forged
bill to your banker; calling on a friend and sweeping his sideboard of
plate, his hall of umbrellas and coats; and then going home to dress for
dinner, say--and to meet a bishop, a judge, and a police magistrate or
so, and talk more morally than any man at table! How I should chuckle
(as my host's spoons clinked softly in my pocket) whilst I was uttering
some noble speech about virtue, duty, charity! I wonder do we meet
garroters in society? In an average tea-party, now, how many returned
convicts are there? Does John Footman, when he asks permission to go and
spend the evening with some friends, pass his time in thuggee; waylay
and strangle an old gentleman, or two; let himself into your house, with
the house-key of course, and appear as usual with the shaving-water
when you ring your bell in the morning? The very possibility of such
a suspicion invests John with a new and romantic interest in my mind.
Behind the grave politeness of his countenance I try and read the
lurking treason. Full of this pleasing subject, I have been talking
thief-stories with a neighbor. The neighbor tells me how some friends of
hers used to keep a jewel-box under a bed in their room; and, going into
the room, they thought they heard a noise under the bed. They had the
courage to look. The cook was under the bed--under the bed with the
jewel-box. Of course she said she had come for purposes connected with
her business; but this was absurd. A cook under a bed is not there for
professional purposes. A relation of mine had a box containing diamonds
under her be