ng crime, found it
advisable to disguise himself and live temporarily in a crowded criminal
quarter of Islington. The rooms he took were above a secondhand clothing
shop kept by a drunken female named Leaver; a supposed widow who lived
at the back of the shop with her two children, Lizzie, a bold-eyed girl
of 17, who worked at a Clerkenwell clothing factory, and Joe, a typical
Cockney boy of fourteen, who sold papers in the streets during the day
and was fast qualifying for a thief at night when Crewe went to the
place to live.

Crewe soon discovered, through overhearing a loud quarrel between his
landlady and her daughter, that Mrs. Leaver's husband was alive, though
dead to his wife for all practical purposes, inasmuch as he was serving a
life's imprisonment for manslaughter. A fortnight after he had taken up
his temporary quarters above the shop the woman was removed to the
hospital suffering from the effects of a hard drinking bout, and died
there. The girl disappeared, and the boy would have been turned out on
the streets but for Crewe, who had taken a liking to him. Joe was
self-reliant, alert, and precocious, like most London street boys, but in
addition to these qualities he had a vein of imagination unusual in a lad
of his upbringing and environment. He devoured the exciting feuilleton
stories in the evening papers he vended, and spent his spare pennies at
the cinema theatres in the vicinity of his poor home. His appreciation of
the crude mysteries of the filmed detective drama amused the famous
expert in the finer art of actual crime detection, until he discovered
that the boy possessed natural gifts of intuition and observation,
combined with penetration. Crewe grew interested in developing the boy's
talent for detective work. When the lad's mother died Crewe decided to
take him into his Holborn offices as messenger-boy. Crewe soon discovered
that Joe had a useful gift for "shadowing" work, and his street training
as a newspaper runner enabled him not only to follow a person through the
thickest of London traffic, but to escape observation where a man might
have been noticed and suspected.

"Well, Joe," said Crewe, as the boy entered on the heels of Stork, "I
have a job for you this morning. I want you to find the glove
corresponding to this one."

Crewe, having finished his examination of the glove, handed it to the
boy, whose first act was to slip it on his left hand and move his fingers
about to assure