The way in which these things are managed might puzzle even a man experienced in City ways to explain, since each company has its own modes of cooking its accounts and hoodwinking the public. But these things are done,--they were yesterday, they have been to-day, they will be to-morrow; and if you live so long, my dear reader, you will hear more about yesterday's doings, and to-day's, and to-morrow's when, a few years hence, you peruse the case of Blank _v._ Blank, or Blank _v._ the Blank Company Limited, or any other improving record of the same sort. The worst of the whole matter is that our clever financiers always keep a little in advance of the law, as our clever thieves always keep a little in advance of our safemakers. The gentlemen of a hundred schemes complacently fleece their victims, and Parliament--wise after--says in solemn convocation that the British sheep shall never be shorn in such and such a way again with impunity. Nevertheless, though not in the same way, the sheep is shorn daily, and the shearer escapes scot-free with the wool. Always lagging behind the wit of the culprit comes the wit of the law. It is only the poor wretches who have no brains to enable them to take a higher flight than picking pockets that really suffer. "You are a hardened ruffian," says the judge, looking through his spectacles at the pickpocket who has been convicted about a dozen times previously, "and I mean to send you for five years where you can pick no more pockets," which indeed the hardened ruffian--stripping off all the false clothing philanthropists love to deck him with--deserves most thoroughly. But, then, what about the hardened ruffians who are never convicted, who float their bubble companies and rob the widow and the orphan as coolly as Bill Sykes, only with smiling faces and well-clothed persons? It is unfair, no doubt, these should escape as they do scot-free, and yet I must confess time has destroyed much of my sympathy with the widow and the orphan who entrust their substance to strangers and believe in the possible solvency--for such as them--of twenty per cent. One is growing particularly tired of that countryman, so familiar to Londoners, who loses his money because two total strangers ask if he has faith enough to trust one or the other with a ten-pound-note, and it is difficult to help feeling that a sound flogging judiciously administered to one of these yokels who take up so much of a magistrate's time, would impress the rural mind throughout England much more effectually than any number of remarks from his Worship or leaders in the daily papers. As one grows older, one's intolerance towards dupes is only equalled by one's intolerance towards bores. A man begins by pitying a dupe and ends by hating him; and the reason is that a dupe has so enormous a capacity for giving trouble and so great a propensity for getting into it.