er Peace was let off lightly with a
month's imprisonment.

After his release Peace would seem to have devoted himself for a time to
music, for which he had always a genuine passion. He taught himself to
play tunes on a violin with one string, and at entertainments which he
attended was described as "the modern Paganini." In later life when he
had attained to wealth and prosperity the violin and the harmonium were
a constant source of solace during long winter evenings in Greenwich and
Peckham. But playing a one-stringed violin at fairs and public-houses
could not be more than a relaxation to a man of Peace's active temper,
who had once tasted what many of those who have practised it, describe
as the fascination of that particular form of nocturnal adventure known
by the unsympathetic name of burglary. Among the exponents of the art
Peace was at this time known as a "portico-thief," that is to say one
who contrived to get himself on to the portico of a house and from that
point of vantage make his entrance into the premises. During the
year 1854 the houses of a number of well-to-do residents in and about
Sheffield were entered after this fashion, and much valuable property
stolen. Peace was arrested, and with him a girl with whom he was keeping
company, and his sister, Mary Ann, at that time Mrs. Neil. On October
20, 1854, Peace was sentenced at Doncaster Sessions to four years' penal
servitude, and the ladies who had been found in possession of the
stolen property to six months apiece. Mrs. Neil did not long survive her
misfortune. She would seem to have been married to a brutal and drunken
husband, whom Peace thrashed on more than one occasion for ill-treating
his sister. After one of these punishments Neil set a bulldog on to
Peace; but Peace caught the dog by the lower jaw and punched it into a
state of coma. The death in 1859 of the unhappy Mrs. Neil was lamented
in appropriate verse, probably the work of her brother:

"I was so long with pain opprest
That wore my strength away;
It made me long for endless rest
Which never can decay."

On coming out of prison in 1858, Peace resumed his fiddling, but it was
now no more than a musical accompaniment to burglary. This had become
the serious business of Peace's life, to be pursued, should necessity
arise, even to the peril of men's lives. His operations extended beyond
the bounds of his native town. The house of a lady living in Mancheste