To this place flocked grooms, valets, and all the silly fry of the district, carrying with them as much money as they could scrape together. Business was generally over by the afternoon, when the proprietors, who never made their exit by the door, climbed up to the top of the tower, and got through a hole in the roof--from which, by a ladder, they descended to a slated roof of a back place about twenty feet lower; they then crawled along about twenty feet of wall, and by an aperture in another, like a gun-port, descended into a back yard, and completed their cat-like line of march through a house in Hertford Street. This, to the astonishment of the neighbours, was done regularly every morning. The place having become a public scandal, Townshend, with several Bow Street runners and four carpenters, went to Warren Street one morning, three hackney coaches being posted at some distance from the scene of action. On the arrival of the peace officers, the four proprietors of No. 13 came out through the roof, and planted their ladder; but it gave way, and they were obliged to jump upon the slated roof twenty feet below them. By some marvellous chance, however, they escaped uninjured, the slates only being broken. They then jumped upon an adjacent wall, and flung their books into the garden of a gentleman's house. No. 17 Warren Street, and followed themselves; their idea was to escape through his back door, but the owner was fortunately at home, and resisted this design. They then leaped the wall of the next house, Drover's, the hairdresser, with their books, and in this house they were secured. One of them fired a pistol at the officers, which fortunately did no harm. The runners had cutlasses and axes, with which they made their way into the house. The inhabitants of the district, it may be added, did not exhibit any enthusiasm for the officers of the law--on the contrary, they showed considerable displeasure against those who had come there to preserve most of them from misery and ruin. The informer, never a popular character, was a lean, cadaverous old woman. She accompanied the swindlers in the first coach, with the hootings of the rabble in her ears, and the whole cavalcade moved off the ground, escorted by a very hostile crowd which accompanied it to Bow Street. Here the four men, who had been arrested with so much difficulty, were sentenced to six months' imprisonment each in the house of correction in Coldbath Fields.