It is said that thieves (I mean strictly professional thieves), who have either been born and bred to the craft of robbery, or who have served an irregular apprenticeship thereto, look with cool deliberation at the risks and contingencies of every enterprise, weigh its profit or loss, and are careful not to load the adverse scale of probabilities by rashness or indiscretion. This is, I believe, the case with regular thieves. It is not the case with those who are betrayed by impulse or necessity into the commission of a single crime. Fast men (clerks, shopmen, and the like), when they rob a till, steal a few pounds' worth of goods, or even perpetrate a forgery, act in the most foolish way imaginable. In most cases they aid the task of their discovery, if they do not entirely lay open the secret of their crime. The case I am describing illustrates one half of my theory, and shows the truth of an old saw which affirms that ill-gotten money does no good to the possessor. The means of the fraud or forgery were procured by the criminal on the Monday afternoon. On the Tuesday morning he made use of them. He did not on that day put in an appearance at his situation, and his absence was immediately remarked. An inquiry was made, by his master's directions, at his lodgings, and it was ascertained that he had not slept there since the Monday night. His landlady was as uneasy about him as his master--perhaps more so. She was starting to make inquiries concerning him, when inquiries were made of her on the subject. The good woman, a widow, who was the mother of a family (all grown up to man and woman's estate, and off her hands), dreaded that some harm had come to her lodger. These forebodings of evil took no definite shape,--that is to say, a hundred different forms of peril, misadventure, and suffering crowded so rapidly on the kind-hearted woman's brain, that they became merged and confused; but her suspicions never traced the fact, nor any thing like the reality. The master of the young man, so far unlike the landlady, was not troubled by many thoughts about his clerk. All that gentleman said or thought about him may be put into a few short sentences. He said he was a blackguard, and that he should never have a character from him; that it was a rascally shame to leave him in the lurch, without the slightest notice; that he ought to be punished (as artisans are in the manufacturing districts) for neglecting his work, and breaking his contract for service. Yet, argued the master, "there are plenty of fish in the sea as good as were ever caught. I dare say I can get another clerk, after all, any day, at 15_s._ per week, quite as good as that fellow. When Mr. Thinshanks comes back whining for me to employ him, he'll find that I won't, that's all. No, it isn't all either. I shall just tell him a bit of my mind as well. I'll kick him out of my counting-house, and tell him to go to ----" Well, never mind