“We have often noticed that,” the visitor is told.
The frightful weapons used by the “Lennie” mutineers are here neatly ranged under the photograph of the ringleader, “French Peter.”
Hard-by is a bundle of letters, forming the correspondence which furnished much of the evidence against Margaret Waters, the baby-farmer.
How much sin, shame, sorrow, and cruelty that small dusty bundle represents it would be hard to say.
A small billycock hat, with a mask fastened inside the broad rim, into which is packed a purse, a comforter, a small lantern, and a life-preserver with a terrific lump of lead on it, is quite a cheerful object to turn to from all these grim relics of worse crimes, though the burglar who formerly owned the life-preserver informed the police—who seized but also rescued him, having come up upon hearing his cries when he was caught between the iron bars of a window, through which he was escaping on a false alarm—that he had thoroughly intended to “do for” anyone who should interrupt him with that convenient weapon.
A large assortment of burglars’ tools is not the least suggestive object here.
The weapons of the thieves’ war upon society are models of good workmanship, and of the adaptation of means to ends.
When the neatest “centre-bit” of the carpenter’s shop is compared with the deft, swift, noiselessly working instrument which goes into an iron shutter as a cheesemonger’s scoop goes into a “fresh Dutch;” when one looks at the wedges of finely-tempered steel working between the zinc side-bits; at the two home-made dark lanterns, contrived with extraordinary cleverness out of a mustard tin and metal match-box respectively; at the rope ladder and the “beautiful litte jemmy,” in a carefully buttoned red flannel case—this small, powerful tool is made of a piece of a driving wheel belonging to the finest machinery, and the metal was, of course, stolen to make it; at the bright, slender, skeleton keys; at the safe-breaking tools—which make one think that there is nothing like the old stocking in the thatch after all—one is amazed at and sorry for the misused cleverness and perverted inventiveness to which these things testify.
Among the skeleton keys is one delicate little contrivance which, at a first glance, one might take for an ornament to a lady’s chatelaine; it is, in fact, a double instrument for picking latch keyholes, one part forming the key and the other lifting the spring.
This pretty trifle was made from the brass clasp of a purse, and used with such success by the inventor that in a short time he found himself in prison.