When they left the theatre they proceeded to an alehouse, and after taking a mug apiece of somebody's "best pale ale," sallied out, and wended their way together homeward, till they came to the parting-place again; and I followed the one whom I did not pursue the night before, only to be led on a long distance up into Hudson Street, when the young man applying his night-key to the door of a very respectable-looking house, entered and vanished. I had begun to make up my mind that this sort of work would not do; that these clerks were but like ten thousand others, who, wearied by their day's work, sought recuperation in slight dissipations, and, perhaps, questionable pleasures, such as billiards, and comedies, and ales give. But I followed up some other of the clerks, reporting every day to Mr. Redding or to Mr. Phillips very ill success. The latter was particularly anxious to have me "go on, and make thorough work of it;" and as the days went on I became much attached to him. My men, too, brought me their accounts daily, with as little success towards the desired end as I myself had, and we were frequently on the point of giving up the job. We concluded that perhaps several of the clerks were engaged in this robbery; that they might have formed a secret society among themselves, and that they probably had a safe place to send their goods to, and a skilful "receiver," who would pay them perhaps half price for the goods, but we could find nothing to sustain this hypothesis. Two or three of the clerks were quite literary in their tastes, and belonged to some debating club, I forget the name now, but it was quite an institution at the time, and thither my men had followed them, and quite fallen in love with the spirited manner and eloquent speech-making of one of the clerks. Of course they followed these wherever they went, and nothing could convince them that these young men were guilty. One of the clerks was an inveterate theatre-goer. He went every night to one theatre or another; but my men found out that he usually had passes, and was, to some extent, a dramatic critic, furnishing the reporters of sundry papers with notes, and that in this way he probably got his passes, and so did not in this way waste much of his slender salary. He neither smoked nor drank liquor, and seemed to be always alone, careless of companionship; so he was dropped as "not the man." Another of the clerks had, it was found, a strange fancy for old books and antique engravings. He spent, evidently, as little money on his person as would suffice to dress neatly and well enough for his position, and put all he could have into old books and engravings; and we found that he was well known by all those strange men, who in these days mostly collect in Nassau Street, and live among the rubbish and dirt of old, and for most part, worthless books, driving keen bargains, giving little, and asking much for some rare old folly of a book, or some worthless volume in which