2. KATE WEBSTER, WHO KILLED HER MISTRESS.
If you walk along the Strand from Charing Cross to Temple Bar, and back to Charing Cross on the other side of the street, any day at an hour when London hums with life, you probably meet at least one man who has either done a murder or who will do murder before he dies. Perhaps his shoulder rubs yours, or, in the jostle, you kick his heel; perhaps you catch a passing glance from a pair of sinister eyes that somehow causes you to feel a moment's vague uneasiness, or, as is more likely, you walk unconscious of a possible contact with murder—but it's there.
3. CHARLES PEACE AS "MR. THOMPSON" THE ENTERTAINER.
I do not now refer to persons tricked into committing murder by the perfidy of circumstances (such persons, for example, as the old man Viney and the young woman Shoosmith, both lately respited), to many of whom a fatal provocation has come at a moment of weakness or of passion, and who, but for that unsought provocation, would have been free from murder; but I do now refer to those men and women who are by nature and inclination callous, scheming, unscrupulous, and insensitive to any pain or injury inflicted by them upon their fellow-creatures, and who are merely human beasts of prey.
4. CHARLES PEACE, SIDE FACE—THE NOTORIOUS ASSASSIN AND BURGLAR.
The sense of self-preservation possessed by all animals, but not possessed in such a high degree, perhaps, by human beings as it is possessed by many of the lower animals, carries with it an instinctive recognition of approaching danger from some other animal. Nature does in many cases, perhaps in all, hold up to us certain danger-signals, and if we were to let our natural instinct guide us—as dogs and young children are instinctively guided—we might often avoid grave evils that come to us from the human beasts of prey: cunning fraud, no less than actual murder, is not allowed by Nature to walk through the world without tell-tale evidences of its approach that ought to warn us. But, as adults, we usually ignore the finer and more delicate suggestions of our natural instinct, and we are guided much too often by what we think is "reason," or by what we believe to be our "best interests"—and then we are more or less mauled, in our pocket or in our person, by one of the many human beasts of prey, when prompt obedience to our instinct would have saved us.