was boarded out at a sergeant's house. He put fourteen of
us in a back room with a tiny window, and charged us 14s. 9d. a week out
of our pay of 15s. The food! I should smile. In case we overdid our
eating, meals were never placed on the table until just before we had to
parade at Wellington Barracks for drill.

"Then we were sent to the old Worship Street Court. We were glad enough
at last to get out on the streets for a breath of air with all our
troubles before us. The very first day, I was called on to arrest one
of a gang of men in Whitechapel. His friends had knives, and they
threatened to 'lay me out' if I touched him. I didn't know whether I was
justified, but I drew my truncheon and swore I'd brain the first man who
came near me. But I was in a cold sweat all the time. They didn't coddle
us in those days."

That was the old system. The wonder is that the police did so well. But
now all that is changed. A policeman is prepared for his
responsibilities by a thorough course of training, as scientific in its
way as that of a doctor, a lawyer, or a school teacher.

Instead of going on his beat redolent of the plough, with a thousand
pitfalls before him, the young constable now has a thorough theoretical
acquaintance with his duties before ever he dons a helmet. More than
that, he has been shrewdly observed for weeks to see whether his
temperament is fitted to his calling. If it is not, be he ever so able
in other respects, he is of no use as a police officer.

In a big building, hidden away in a back street at Westminster, the
embryo policeman learns the first principles of his trade. Peel House,
as this school of police is called, was established by the present
Commissioner a few years ago, and since then has trained thousands of
men.

Always there will be found two or three hundred young men gathered
together from the remote corners of the British Isles, being gradually
moulded into shape by a corps of instructors under Superintendent
Gooding.

They have two characteristics in common--a character without flaw, and a
good physique. For the rest, there are all types, with the agricultural
labourer predominating--a country-house footman, an Irishman from some
tiny village near Kilkenny, a sailor, a clerk, a provincial constable
hoping to better himself, and, more raw than the rawest, men from
Devonshire, Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland.

It is said that a _good_ Irishman makes the best officer, while perhaps
t