little less indispensable than his breakfast, but much more important
than his cigar. Had he been precisely the sort of man for employing
police agency where personal investigation was possible, he would never
have climbed the tree in Prince Street or dragged Harding under the
stoop of the brown-stone house. He suggested that Harding would not have
much difficulty in making himself up for a postman, and getting inside
the up-town house in that capacity, trusting to his own skill to
_remain_ within until he had made the necessary investigations; while as
for himself--well, he had no particular objections to entering
temporarily upon the occupation of a tinker or a gatherer of old rags
and bottles, with a disguise from his friend Williams, the costumer, and
working the basement of the house on Prince Street, and the domestics
therein employed, in one of those capacities. He had no doubt whatever
that if he could only succeed in concealing himself in the sub-cellar or
the coal-vault, until the house should be closed for the night, he could
then, with the aid of a few matches and a pair of list slippers carried
in the pocket, make a "rummage" of the premises which must prove
eminently satisfactory. He did not seem to labor under any fear that the
little accident of being discovered while lying perdu or while making
his explorations, and arrested and sent to Blackwell's Island as an
ordinary sneak-thief, might possibly stand in the way. In fact, if all
stories of his earlier life were to be credited, he had taken some
pains, in more than one instance, to be arrested by the Police under
what appeared to be suspicious circumstances, spend a night in the
station-house, and astound the Police Justices, who personally knew him
somewhat too well for their comfort, by his appearance as a very
woe-begone culprit in the morning. "_De gustibus non est_," etc.--there
is really no disputing about tastes, since St. Simeon Stylites roosted
upon the top of a very inconvenient pillar, and the first ostrich
inaugurated the dietary proclivities of the race by gobbling down a
small cart-load of cord-wood with a garnish of a peck of paving-stones!
A night in a station-house may not be so very unpleasant a thing, when
taken from choice and with a certainty of the door being laughingly
opened in the morning: Whiskey Tom or Scratching Sall, who visit the
institution perforce, for small burglaries or big vagrancies, with a
prospect of "six months" o