When on the move, the street tactician is obliged to be constantly on the alert, to have all his eyes about him, lest an enemy should come upon him unawares. This incessant vigilance keeps him always wide awake, always on the look-out, and makes him as sharp as a needle. Even while speaking to you, his keen and restless eye is roving up and down the street to see that no danger is approaching. Like the training of the Indian, this incessant vigilance improves his physical faculties wonderfully, especially his vision, which it renders singularly acute. He can detect a creditor at a distance at which the nearest friend, the most intimate acquaintance of that person, could not recognise him: he can see him approaching in a crowded street, where no other eye but his own could possibly single him out. Gifted with this remarkable power of vision, it is rare that the street tactician is taken by surprise, as it affords him time to plan and effect his escape, at both of which he is amazingly prompt and dexterous. As the great object with the street tactician in moving from one point of the city to another is not the shortest but the safest course, he is necessarily subjected to a vast deal of traverse sailing, and thereby to enormous increases of distance, being frequently obliged to make the circuit of half the town to get at the next street. His way is thus most particularly devious, and to one who should watch his motions without knowing the principles on which he moves, would appear altogether incomprehensible. Here he crosses a street with a sudden dart, there he turns a corner with a slow and stealthy step; now he walks deliberately, now as if it were for a wager. Again he walks slowly; then comes a sudden brush: it is to clear some dangerous spot in which an enemy is lurking in ambuscade--the shop door of a creditor. Now he _cuts_ down an alley; now hesitates before he emerges at the opposite end; now darts out of it as if he had been fired from it, like a shell from a mortar. And thus, and thus, and thus he finally completes his circuitous and perilous journey. It is fatiguing and laborious work, but it must be done if he would avoid being worried to death.