santry was uttered as he ascended the table. 'George,' he
muttered, 'you are first in hand,' and thereafter he took farewell
of his friends. Only one word of petulance escaped his lips: when the
halters were found too short, his contempt for slovenly workmanship
urged him to protest, and to demand a punishment for the executioner.
Again ascending the table, he assured himself against further mishap
by arranging the rope with his own hands. Thus he was turned off in
a brilliant assembly. The Provost and Magistrates, in respect for his
dandyism, were resplendent in their robes of office, and though the
crowd of spectators rivalled that which paid a tardy honour to Jonathan
Wild, no one was hurt save the customary policeman. Such was the
dignified end of a 'double life.' And the duplicity is the stranger,
because the real Deacon was not Brodie the Cracksman, but Brodie the
Gentleman. So lightly did he esteem life that he tossed it from him in
a careless impulse. So little did he fear death that, 'What is hanging?'
he asked. 'A leap in the dark.'

II--CHARLES PEACE

CHARLES PEACE, after the habit of his kind, was born of scrupulously
honest parents. The son of a religious file-maker, he owed to his father
not only his singular piety but his love of edged tools. As he never
encountered an iron bar whose scission baffled him, so there never was
a fire-eating Methodist to whose ministrations he would not turn a
repentant ear. After a handy portico and a rich booty he loved nothing
so well as a soul-stirring discourse. Not even his precious fiddle
occupied a larger space in his heart than that devotion which the
ignorant have termed hypocrisy. Wherefore his career was no less
suitable to his ambition than his inglorious end. For he lived the king
of housebreakers, and he died a warning to all evildoers, with a prayer
of intercession trembling upon his lips.

The hero's boyhood is wrapped in obscurity. It is certain that no
glittering precocity brought disappointment to his maturer years, and he
was already nineteen when he achieved his first imprisonment. Even then
'twas a sorry offence, which merited no more than a month, so that he
returned to freedom and his fiddle with his character unbesmirched.
Serious as ever in pious exercises, he gained a scanty living as
strolling musician. There was never a tavern in Sheffield where the
twang of his violin was unheard, and the skill wherewith he extorted
music from a singl