“Stand forward, Kit Davis. You are charged with various acts of swindling and cheating,--light offences, all of them,--committed in the best of company, and in concert with honorable and even noble colleagues. By the virtue of your oath, Captain Davis, how many horses have you poisoned, how many jockeys have you drugged, what number of men have you hocussed at play, what sums have you won from others in a state of utter insensibility? Can you state any case where you enforced a false demand by intimidation? Can you charge your memory with any instance of shooting a man who accused you of foul play? What names besides your own have you been in the habit of signing to bills? Have you any revelations to make about stock transferred under forgery? Will you kiss the book, and say that nineteen out of twenty at the hulks have not done a fiftieth part of what you have done? Will you solemnly take oath that there are not ten, fifteen, twenty charges, which might be prosecuted against you, to transportation for life? and are there not two--or, certainly, is there not one--with a heavier forfeiture on it? Are there not descriptions of you in almost every police bureau in Europe, and photographic likenesses, too, on frontier passport-offices of little German States, that Hesse and Cassel and Coburgh should not be ravaged by the wolf called Grog Davis?” “And if this be so, to what end do I sacrifice myself?” cried she, in bitter anguish. “Were it not better to seek out some far-away land where we cannot be traced? Let us go to America, to Australia,--I don't care how remote it be,--the country that will shelter us--” “Not a step. I'll not budge out of Europe; win or lose, here I stay! Do as I tell you, girl, and the game is our own. It has been my safety this many a year that I could compromise so many in my own fall. Well, time has thinned the number marvellously. Many have died. The Cholera, the Crimea, the Marshalsea, broken hearts, and what not, have done their work; and of the few remaining, some have grown indifferent to exposure, others have dropped out of view, and now it would be as much as I could do to place four or five men of good names in the dock beside me. That ain't enough. I must have connections.