Occasionally, when in some famous case of elaborate fraud there is a suspicion that the person arrested is a man of good family fallen into evil ways, there is a hint in the Press of the mystery of identity. But it is rarely more than a hint. No one knows the truth but the unhappy man himself and his still unhappier relatives, who throughout the trial are in terror lest the accused should, in a moment of weakness, betray himself, and fix the shame of his evil-doings upon the name they bear. But, as a rule, the well-born man who has fallen low respects his family, and the mystery of the identity of many a criminal who passes from the dock to the convict gaol has been as well preserved, as far as the great public are concerned, as the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask. One reads old stories of women who all their lives have passed without suspicion as men, and accepts them as possible in the past. But sometimes the world is startled by the discovery that this mystery of sex is still maintained by women even in the lowlier walks of life, where one would think romance of the kind would have no place. Not long since a working-man, grey-haired and wrinkled, came before a London magistrate, and was proved to be a woman. She had passed as a man and laboured as a man for nearly forty years, and no one had suspected the truth. In some cases, for good and sufficient reasons, this form of fraud--for in a sense it is fraud--is aided and abetted by relatives, who keep the secret to the end. One has only to remember that large sums of money and vast estates pass away from families in default of an heir male to understand how sometimes the girl-child is dressed and brought up as a "boy" from the earliest period. The fraud _must_ sooner or later be found out, you would think. But with money to back it up there is no absolute reason that it should be. Many of these men-women have been married to "wives," and the wife has kept the secret. There are a dozen cases known and authenticated to prove it. In most instances the secret has been discovered or confessed at last. But there are some cases in which the secret is kept undivulged through life and passed on to the eternal silence of the grave. End of Project Gutenberg's The Mysteries of Modern London, by George R. Sims