One day the messenger whom Booth had sent with the metal had forgotten to bring a pattern. “Taking out a three-shilling piece, the man inserted it in one slit after another of the gauge, until he found the one which exactly corresponded with its thickness, and this he gave as the guide.” His long freedom from punishment rendered the coiner careless, and he was at last surprised. The whole Birmingham police force was mustered, and a troop of dragoons was got from the barracks. A ladder had been brought, and an entrance was made through the tiling of the roof. It seemed as if they were once more too late, for at first nothing could be found. One of the “runners,” however, in mounting the ladder, had through the bars of an upper window seen Booth hurriedly thrusting papers, that no doubt were forged notes, into the fire. A hole was broken into the chimney, and in it were found one whole note, and one partly burnt. The prisoners were taken to Birmingham, and thence were sent by the magistrates to Stafford, under the guard of a small body of horse. Booth was hanged. It is scarcely wonderful that criminals openly defied the laws, for the police-force of Birmingham was very small. The town contained in the early years of this century about seventy thousand inhabitants. Yet the whole police-force for day duty consisted of less than twenty men. By night, guard was kept by the usual body of “ancient and most quiet watchmen.” The town, moreover, like all other towns, was but dimly lighted with its oil-lamps. Rowland was about seventeen years old when, “with almost unbounded delight, I first saw,” he writes, “streets illuminated by gas.” Yet the peace was, on the whole, not ill kept. From 1803 to 1833 there were but three riots, and of these only one was at all serious. The town had not even in those days a Recorder, and the criminals were sent to the Assizes at Warwick. The stage-coaches, as Rowland well remembered, were all furnished with strong staples, to which the fetters of prisoners were fast locked. He had himself, when he was still a little lad, sat on the coach beside a man thus fettered. The fellow made light of his position. “He had,” he said, “only robbed a hen-roost, and they couldn’t touch his neck for that.” Some idle gossip, seeing Rowland thus sitting by the thief, at once spread the report that the boy on the coach was going to Warwick on the charge of robbing his master.