“Well, then, how stand your noses? You”—to M‘Sally—“have a turned-up one, and a little awry, I think?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you”—to Stewart—“have a very long one, raised in the middle?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, well; suppose the clothes of the one put upon the other—it was easy for you to change them—and we have you to a button. Bertram, pass these gentlemen to a cell for the night, and I shall get them sent off to Edinburgh in the morning.”
Next day we had a letter setting forth the dodge of the exchange, and the curious way they had fallen into the hands of the Superintendent. It was thence an easy business to get our two gentlemen to go to the right shop—Norfolk Island—after having tried the wrong one at Berwick. They and Anderson were transported for seven years. M‘Culloch was acquitted.
The Mustard-Blister.
I BELIEVE that if any one were to look back upon his past life for the purpose of tracing out the most curious parts of it, he would find that they originated in the work of my old lady, Chance, and which is nothing more than something occurring just at the moment when it is unlooked for, but, being taken advantage of, turns out to be important. The great secret is to be able to seize the advantage, and this, as concerns my kind of work, lies in something like natural reasoning. If there’s anything out of the ordinary fitness of things, I begin to try to find out why it should be so. Books and learning don’t help a man here. I have sometimes thought they rather work against him, and hence it is that we find so many illiterate people rise up to be great and wealthy. Ay, but they can also be clever in a bad way; so with our thieves; but I have this consolation, that if their mother-wit has done a great deal for them, mine has also to their cost done something for me. I will give you a case.
In 1845, there were almost daily occurring cases of robbery from larders in the New Town, and, what was more extraordinary, the accounts all tallied as to the fact that the thieves were exceedingly dainty. It was only the fine pieces of meat that would please them—large joints and legs of mutton—nor did they seem to care for cold meat, in some instances leaving it, as if they were above that kind of food. Of course, I had my ordinary professional reasons for being active in endeavouring to lay hold of these burglars, who seemed to be so envious of the good things of their neighbours, but I confess to the weakness of having had a little of that same feeling in regard to them. I was not easy under the notion that any of my children should be thus living at hack and manger in so very much more luxurious a manner than myself, and felt a great desire to shew them the difference between these hot joints and the fare I am in the habit of providing for them.
But how was I to get hold of them? Who could trace a leg of mutton after it was cut down and eaten? No wee pawns for joints or beefsteaks, and then the omnivorous gentry are generally so hungry that they could not afford, however epicurean, to lay past, to get tender and high-flavoured, a gigot of wether mutton or piece of venison. Then as to catching red-hand, that was out of the question, for upon inquiry it was found that the thieves never tried a larder a second time. I could, in short, make no discovery, and I was more uncomfortable under my want of success than I generally am, insomuch that my cooks were not only angry at losing their joints, but driven into a passion at the gentry’s dinners being spoilt by the disappearance on the previous night of some “old leg” which had been kept a fortnight for the very occasion, and which could not be supplied by the butcher. Their honour was at stake, and we all know what the honour of a cuisinière amounts to when the same is calculated by the dripping lips of a gobe-mouche. I have caught “old legs,” which, like Madeira, had been sent over the sea to improve, and have found them improved in the contrary way, but here my “old legs” defied me.