I pursued Ellsworth somewhat afterwards, visiting his "family" in Williamsburg, but I could not get track of him for a long while, when he turned up in another city, and I chanced to make him available in the detection of sundry other rogues. But that story is sui generis, and I must not mar it by a recital of a part here.
As for the brave medical student (whose name I have purposely withheld), he became a fast friend of mine, and afterwards we had several adventures together, some of which I purpose to relate, should I at some other time feel more in the spirit to do so.
Enough to know now, that he is, for his years, an eminent physician, with a large practice, in a district in the South, and married to a most beautiful woman, whose acquaintance he made while once playing the amateur detective. In some of these papers, perhaps, his name, if he permits, will be disclosed. Had he given himself to the business, I conceive that he could not have had a successful rival, as a detective, in the world. The same knowledge of human nature which the detective needs, cannot but serve the physician to great advantage.
Mr. Purvis said that if he had wholly lost the thousand dollars, the lesson he had learned would have been cheaply bought.
THE WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING.
THE ANTIQUITY OF THAT SHEEP'S SKIN AND ITS PIOUS USEFULNESS—A LARGE LOSS OF SILKS, SATINS, LACES, AND OTHER GOODS—A CONSULTATION—A LONG STUDY—THE VARIOUS CHARACTERS OF SEVERAL CLERKS, WHAT THEY DID, AND HOW THEY KILLED "SPARE TIME"—INFLUENCE OF THE CITY ON MORALS—NEW YORK CENTRAL PARK—A MOST WONDERFUL SERIES OF THEFTS—THE MATTER INEXPLICABLE AT FIRST, GROWS MORE SUBTLE—A GLEAM OF LIGHT AT LAST—A BRIGHT ITALIAN BOY PLAYS A PART—A LADY FOLLOWED—MORE LIGHT—AN EXTEMPORIZED SERVANT OF THE CROTON WATER BOARD GETS INSIDE A CERTAIN HOUSE—SARAH CROGAN AND I—HOW A HOUSE IN NINETEENTH STREET DELIVERED UP ITS TREASURES—"WILLIAM BRUCE," ALIAS CHARLES PHILLIPS—A VERY STRANGE DENOUEMENT—A MEEK MAN TRANSFORMED; HIS RAGE—A DELIVERY UP, WITH ACCOMPANYING JEWELS—A "WIDOW" NOT A WIDOW REMOVES—WHAT SARAH CROGAN THOUGHT.
It is an astonishing thing to a detective, and ought to be to every person of sense, it seems to me, that after the experiences of ages "the-wolf-in-sheep's-clothing" still keeps on deluding people. Everybody ought by this time to know the animal, and everybody does, in a sense; but everybody has heard of him, and seen him somewhere along the path of life, and either been bitten by him, or sorely frightened, or something of the sort. Yet forever he is playing his wiles with success with everybody; and his sheep skin is the same one he has used ever since historic time began, and perhaps long before that. But I did not take my pen to descant upon the blunders and stupidities of my fellow-mortals, or to adorn this page with a lecture on morals and hypocrisies, but to tell a tale in which, perchance, a "moral" will be better "painted" by the facts it discloses than by my discursive pen.