rench as it was misspoken in
the hells of Edinburgh, it is a narrative of uncommon simplicity and
directness, marred now and again by such superfluous reflections as are
the natural result of thievish sentimentality. He tells his tale without
paraphrase or adornment, and the worthy Writer to the Signet, who
prepared the work for the Press, would have asked three times the space
to record one-half the adventures. 'I sunk upon it with my forks
and brought it with me'; 'We obtained thirty-three pounds by this
affair'--is there not the stalwart flavour of the epic in these plain,
unvarnished sentences?

His other accomplishments are pallid in the light of his brilliant left
hand. Once, at Derry--he attended a cock-fight, and beguiled an interval
by emptying the pockets of a lucky bookmaker. An expert, who watched
the exploit in admiration, could not withhold a compliment. 'You are the
Switcher,' he exclaimed; 'some take all, but you leave nothing.' And it
is as the Switcher that Haggart keeps his memory green.

II--GENTLEMAN HARRY

'DAMN ye both! stop, or I will blow your brains out!' Thus it was that
Harry Simms greeted his victims, proving in a phrase that the heroic
age of the rumpad was no more. Forgotten the debonair courtesy of
Claude Duval! Forgotten the lightning wit, the swift repartee of the
incomparable Hind! No longer was the hightoby-gloak a 'gentleman' of
the road; he was a butcher, if not a beggar, on horseback; a braggart
without the courage to pull a trigger; a swashbuckler, oblivious of that
ancient style which converted the misery of surrender into a privilege.
Yet Harry Simms, the supreme adventurer of his age, was not without
distinction; his lithe form and his hard-ridden horse were the common
dread of England; his activity was rewarded with a princely treasure;
and if his method were lacking in urbanity, the excuse is that he danced
not to the brilliant measure of the Cavaliers, but limped to the clumsy
fiddle-scraping of the early Georges.

At Eton, where a too-indulgent grandmother had placed him, he ransacked
the desks of his school-fellows, and avenged a birching by emptying his
master's pockets. Wherefore he lost the hope of a polite education, and
instead of proceeding with a clerkly dignity to King's College, in
the University of Cambridge, he was ignominiously apprenticed to a
breeches-maker. The one restraint was as irksome as the other, and Harry
Simms abandoned the needle, as he