There is a portrait sketch of Jack Sheppard by Sir James Thornhill in the adjoining room. The audacious young rascal has a curious face in which there is intellect, even soul, and an animal sort of alertness, and the account of his daring escape from Newgate, where he was loaded with irons and chained to a staple in the floor, reads like a page from Dumas. He had, too, the sort of luck that attends heroes in fiction when he found that small nail with which he freed his chain from the floor staple. This done he got up the chimney, broke into a room over the chapel with the aid of another large nail, which was provided by Providence for the purpose, and with the help of an iron spike from the chapel door, hacked a hole in the wall, through which he climbed on to the leads. One holds one's breath when, these obstacles surmounted and liberty almost within his grasp, Jack is confronted with the need of a rope, and goes back to his cell by the way he had come to fetch his blanket! It is not only the courage, but the optimism of the act which strikes one, an optimism which was justified. He got the blanket, made the rope, and with its aid descended to the roof of a turner who lived in a house adjoining the prison. One must bear in mind, too, that Jack was still handicapped by his irons! Picture him, having effected an entrance into the turner's house by means of a garret window, slinking down the stairs, past closed doors which might open any moment to wreck his project at the moment of consummation. According to that same account of his escape, a woman heard the chink of his irons as he passed one of those doors, and thought it was the cat! Maybe she was sitting by the fire nursing her baby, or reading some tale of adventure, little dreaming that as exciting a story as any in fiction was being enacted at her elbow. One hears with regret that Jack's liberty was short-lived. Not a week had passed before he was at his old game of burglary, and being captured whilst drunk was once more imprisoned in Newgate, only to leave it this time to be hanged at Tyburn. Whilst I sought to read the riddle of the young reprobate's strange physiognomy, Mrs. Darling was browsing with dark satisfaction amongst the murder trials and executions. There she stood, spectacles on the tip of her nose, hat perched at a jaunty angle, her lips forming the words of the "Sorrowful Lamentation and last Farewell to the world of four robbers," as she read:-- Four hopeless youth this day I tell In Newgate dark and drear. O, hear their last and sad farewell To part this world of care. On Tuesday next, that awful day Which fast approaches nigh, All in their prime of youthful years They must prepare to die. "Ain't it 'eart renderin'!" she exclaimed, as I looked over her shoulder. "I reckon the man who said, 'Wot's got over the devil's back is spent under 'is belly,' wasn't very far wrong neither."