The sailor flushed with anger.

'What sort of proposal is that to make a man? I know enough of law to
understand that Mary would be held as accomplice. Do you think I would
leave her alone to face the music while I slunk away? No, sir, let them
do their worst upon me, but for heaven's sake, Mr. Holmes, find some way
of keeping my poor Mary out of the courts.'

Holmes for a second time held out his hand to the sailor.

'I was only testing you, and you ring true every time. Well, it is a
great responsibility that I take upon myself, but I have given Hopkins
an excellent hint, and if he can't avail himself of it I can do no more.
See here, Captain Crocker, we'll do this in due form of law. You are the
prisoner. Watson, you are a British jury, and I never met a man who was
more eminently fitted to represent one. I am the judge. Now, gentleman
of the jury, you have heard the evidence. Do you find the prisoner
guilty or not guilty?'

'Not guilty, my lord,' said I.

'_Vox populi, vox Dei._ You are acquitted, Captain Crocker. So long as
the law does not find some other victim you are safe from me. Come back
to this lady in a year, and may her future and yours justify us in the
judgment which we have pronounced this night!'

THE PRIZE LODGER

By George Gissing

(_Human Odds and Ends/Stories and Sketches_, London: Lawrence and Bullen
Ltd, 1898)

The ordinary West-End Londoner--who is a citizen of no city at all, but
dwells amid a mere conglomerate of houses at a certain distance from
Charing Cross--has known a fleeting surprise when, by rare chance, his
eye fell upon the name of some such newspaper as the _Battersea Times_,
the _Camberwell Mercury_, or the _Islington Gazette_. To him, these and
the like districts are nothing more than compass points of the huge
metropolis. He may be in practice acquainted with them; if historically
inclined, he may think of them as old-time villages swallowed up by
insatiable London; but he has never grasped the fact that in Battersea,
Camberwell, Islington, there are people living who name these places as
their home; who are born, subsist, and die there as though in a distinct
town, and practically without consciousness of its obliteration in the
map of a world capital.

The stable element of this population consists of more or less
old-fashioned people. Round about them is the ceaseless coming and going
of nomads who keep abreast with the time, who take their lodgings by t