Let us see, too, where this physical incapacity may lead to graver consequences than the mere allowing a detected thief to run at large. In the great cities there have sprung up within a few years back storehouses for the safe-keeping of securities, plate, important papers, and other valuables. Hedged around with plates of steel, chronometer-locks, massive bolts, and several watchmen, and connected with the nearest police station by wires so arranged that the doors cannot be opened without sounding the alarm at the station-house, the public naturally put their trust in them, and their property too. Within recent years we also hear far more than formerly of burglars going not in pairs or threes, but in gangs of half a dozen or more, and of cracking safes always thought impenetrable. Now, suppose that a descent were made on the largest one of these safe depositories in America, the one under the New York Stock Exchange, and by a dozen first-class cracksmen. Their business hours are generally between one and four in the morning. That they work with wonderful sagacity, daring, and despatch, is attested by such brilliant performance as that at the Northampton Bank robbery, or when they in a little time, one morning, relieved the Manhattan Bank of a few millions, and that right within a block of police head-quarters in New York city. Suppose that, by collusion or otherwise, the robbers get through the outer door. Unlike the Bank of England, there is no platoon of soldiers on guard. They silence the three or four who oppose them. They come to the inner doors, the opening of which alarms the police. At the station-house, when that alarm sounds, three or four, or maybe more, more or less drowsy officers start and run for the Stock Exchange, some eight hundred feet away. Is there any especial reason why they should be any less exhausted when they get there than the two policemen who failed to catch the Sixth Avenue thief, or the two who let another on First Avenue run clear out of their sight? The four blocks the former two policemen ran do not make much over eight hundred feet. Suppose that three or four, not half-grown fellows like "sleepy" Dick, but stalwart desperadoes, used to rough work, quietly await the arrival of these worthy, but well-blown patrolmen. How long would it take the thieves to at least check the advance, if not also considerably impair the usefulness of men so nearly gone that they could not speak, and whose hands shook so that aiming a revolver effectively would be practically out of the question?