FRIGHTENED AT A RED LIGHT.
A driver, not on duty, had been drinking, and was, in company with his fireman, walking in the vicinity of the Edgware Road, when he suddenly started violently, and seizing his mate’s arm, shouted—
“Hold hard, mate—hold hard!”
“What’s the matter?” cried the fireman.
“Matter!” roared the driver, “why, you’re a-running by the red light;” and he pointed to the crimson glare which streamed through a glass bottle in a chemist’s window.
“Come along; that’s nothing,” said the fireman, trying to drag him on.
“What, run by the red light, and go afore Dannel in the morning?” retorted the driver, and no persuasion could or did get him to pass the shop. He was a Great Western man, and the “Dannel” whom he held in such wholesome awe was the celebrated engineer, now Sir Daniel Gooch, and chairman of that line. He was then the locomotive chief, and renowned above all other things for maintaining discipline among his staff, while they cherished a feeling for him very much akin to what we hear of the clannish enthusiasm of the ancient Scotch.
THE DECOY TRUNK.
August 27, 1875. The Metropolitan magistrates have had before them a case which seems likely to show how some, at least, of the robberies at railway stations are accomplished. Some ingenious persons, it appears, have devised a way by which a trunk can be made to steal a trunk, and a portmanteau to annex a portmanteau. The thieves lay a trunk artfully contrived on a smaller trunk; the latter clings to the former, and the owner of the larger carries both away. The decoy trunk is said to be fitted with a false bottom, which goes up when it is laid on a smaller trunk, and with mechanism inside which does for the innocent trunk what Polonius recommended Laertes to do for his friend, and grapples it to its heart with hooks of steel. In fact, the decoy duck—we do not know how better to describe it—is made to perform an office like that of certain flowers, which suddenly close at the pressure of a fly or other insect within their cup and imprison him there.
—Annual Register, 1875.