Yet with all this the Indian native policeman is but indifferently paid, much less than a soldier or other subordinate members of the public departments. Ordinary labour even is better paid. The horsekeeper, the gardener, the cowman is better off, even the coolie despises the pittance of the policeman, who has no advantages but those of a remote pension and the respect he inspires as a man clothed with a little authority. [Illustration: JERBOA RATS.] CHAPTER XII. THE DETECTIVE, AND WHAT HE HAS DONE. The Detective in Fiction and in Fact--Early Detection--Case of Lady Ivy--Thomas Chandler--Mackoull, and how he was run down by a Scots Solicitor--Vidocq: his Early Life, Police Services, and End--French Detectives generally--Amicable Relations between French and English Detectives. The detective, both professional and amateur, since Edgar Allan Poe invented Dupin, has been a prominent personage in fiction and on the stage. He has been made the central figure of innumerable novels and plays, the hero, the pivot on which the plot turns. Readers ever find him a favourite, whether he is called Hawkshaw or Captain Redwood, Grice or Stanhope, Van Vernet or Père Tabaret, Sherlock Holmes or Monsieur Lecocq. But imagination, however fertile, cannot outdo the reality, and it is with the detective in the flesh that I propose to deal. I propose to take him in the different stages of his evolution--from the thief reformed and become a thief-taker, down to the present honourable officer, the guardian of our lives and property, the law's chief weapon and principal vindicator. In times past the detection of crime was left very much to chance; but now and again shrewd agents, both public officials and private persons, contributed to the discovery of frauds and other misdeeds. Long ago, in France, as I have shown, there was an organised police force which often had resort, both for good and evil, to detective methods. Here in England the office of constable was purely local, and his duties were rather to make arrests in clear cases of flagrant wrong-doing than to follow up obscure and mysterious crime. The ingenious piecing together of clues and the following up of light and baffling scents was generally left to the lawyers and those engaged on behalf of the parties injured or aggrieved. THE CASE OF LADY IVY.