down on the rail. He there became reflective, and
recalled, with some degree of amusement as well as satisfaction, some of
the more recent incidents of his vocation. He smiled as he remembered
how, not very far from where he sat, he had on a cloudy evening got into
a horse-box, and boring a hole in it with a gimlet, applied his eye
thereto,--his satellite David Blunt doing the same in another end of the
same horse-box, and how, having thus obtained a clear view of a truck in
which several casks of wine were placed, he beheld one of the servants
on the line in company with one of his friends who was _not_ a servant
on the line, coolly bore a hole in one of the wine casks and insert a
straw, and, by that means, obtain a prolonged and evidently satisfactory
draught--which accounted at once for the fact that wine had been leaking
in that locality for some time past, and that the said servant had been
seen more than once in a condition that was deemed suspicious.

Mr Sharp also reflected complacently--and he had time to reflect, for
the driver and fireman were rather long of coming--on another case in
which the thieves were so wary that for a long time he could make
nothing of them, although their depredations were confined to a train
that passed along the line at a certain hour, but at last were caught in
consequence of his hitting on a plan of having a van specially prepared
for himself. He smiled again--almost laughed when he thought of this
van--how it was regularly locked and labelled on a quiet siding; how a
plank was loosened in the bottom of it, by which means he got into it,
and was then shunted out, and attached to the train, so that neither
guard, nor driver, nor fireman, had any idea of what was inside; how he
thereafter bored several small gimlet holes in the various sides of the
van and kept a sharp look-out from station to station as they went
along; how at last he came to the particular place--not a station, but a
place where a short pause was made--where the wary thieves were; how he
saw them--two stout fellows--approach in the gloom of evening and begin
their wicked work of cutting tarpaulings and abstracting goods; how he
thereupon lifted his plank and dropped out on the line, and how he
powerfully astonished them by laying his hands on their collars and
taking them both in the very act!

At last Mr Sharp's entertaining reflections were interrupted by the
approach of the driver of the engine, who carri