Just before the late war broke out, and the Winter Garden Theatre being in its prime, my friend, Henry C. P., of New Haven, Conn., being in town, urged me to accompany him there one night to see the play. The house was quite crowded with a more than usually fashionable set of play-goers, many being from different parts of the land, visitors for a time in New York. No matter where I go, to theatre, court, or church, along Broadway crowded with its vast moving tides of humanity, or through the streets of some half-deserted hamlet, my mind is ever on my business; rather, ever pondering on the craft and crime of society, symbols of which, in more or less emphatic shape, I am ever liable to see. It is one of the greatest vexations which the detective suffers, that the nature of his business is such that he can never fully liberate his thoughts from dwelling upon the frailties, the follies, and particularly the crimes, petty and felonious, of which so many of his fellow-men are constantly being guilty. Like an incubus of dread and darkness, these thoughts are ever weighing on his mind. He has no peace; and the only approximate peace he can win, is to let his thoughts drift on in the usual current, without attempting to direct them by his will. Consequently, that night, though for a while I enjoyed the play, studying its representations of human nature with some delight, and being not a little pleased with the beauty of sundry of the female _dramatis personæ_, who were rather above the average in personal graces, my eye was wandering over the parquet, family circle, etc., considerably. Hearing a slight noise in a part of the gallery, I observed that three young men, probably having a "prior engagement" to fill somewhere, were leaving the theatre,--a thing of no moment in itself, and which I should have forgotten on the instant, only that the vacancy they left enabled me to cast my eye a little farther on, when I discovered a character of much interest to me--a man elegantly apparelled, and having every outward semblance of a gentleman. At the moment my eye first rested on him there, he was peering into one of the boxes, and I saw him soon in the act of whispering some mystery, apparently, into the ear of the comrade who sat by his side. The latter person I did not know; but knowing the company he was in, I divined that some mischief was up, for the former person was no other than a man whom, in my detective career, I had several times encountered--an elegant, scheming fellow, who sometimes operated on Wall Street, kept an office at 34 Pine Street, as a real estate broker and money lender, etc., though he was seldom there, and was as skilful a juggler and pickpocket as any of whom New York could at that time boast. I could not, from my then position, well see into the boxes, so I changed my seat--through the courtesy of an old friend, who gave me his in exchange for mine--to a point where I could watch the boxes and the two