Supposing it to be true, and for my part I sincerely believe it, that the ranks of neglected children who eventually become thieves, are recruited in great part from the castaways of the mock child adopter, then is solved the puzzle how it is that among a class the origin of almost every member of which can be traced back to the vilest neighbourhood of brutishness and ignorance, so many individuals of more than the average intellect are discovered. Any man who has visited a reformatory for boys must have observed this. Let him go into the juvenile ward or the school-room of a workhouse, either in town or country, and he will find four-fifths of the lads assembled wearing the same heavy stolid look, indicative of the same desperate resignation to the process of learning than which for them could hardly be devised a punishment more severe. But amongst a very large proportion of the boys who have been rescued not merely from the gutter but out of the very jaws of the criminal law, and bestowed in our reformatories, how different is their aspect! Quick-witted, ready of comprehension, bold-eyed, shrewdly-observant, one cannot but feel that it is a thousand pities that such boys should be driven to this harbour of refuge—that so much good manhood material should come so nigh to being wrecked. But how is it that with no more promising nurses than squalor and ignorance the boys of the reformatory should show so much superior to the boys whom a national institution, such as a workhouse is, has adopted, and had all to do with since their infancy? The theory that many of the boys who by rapid steps in crime find their way to a reformatory, are bastard children, for whose safe-keeping the baby farmer was once briefly responsible, goes far towards solving the riddle. The child-adopting fraternity is an extensive one, and finds clients in all grades of society, and there can be little doubt that in instances innumerable, while Alley Jack is paying the penalty of his evil behaviour by turning for his bread on the treadmill, his brothers, made legitimate by the timely reformation and marriage of Alley Jack’s father, are figuring in their proper sphere, and leisurely and profitably developing the intellect they inherit from their brilliant papa. Alley Jack, too, has his share of the family talent—all the brain, all the sensitiveness, all the “blood” of the respectable stock a reckless sprig of which is responsible for Jack’s being. It is only in the nature of things to suppose that Jack’s blood is tainted with the wildness of wicked papa; and here we have in Alley Jack a type of that bold intellectual villain whose clique of fifty or so, as Lord Shaftesbury recently declared, is more to be dreaded than as many hundred of the dull and plodding sort of thief, the story of whose exploits figure daily in the newspapers.