There can be no question that that of the professional thief is a bitterly severe and laborious occupation, beset with privations that moral people have no conception of, and involves an amount of mental anxiety and torment that few human beings can withstand through a long lifetime. Some years ago a clergyman with a thorough acquaintance with the subject he was handling, wrote on “Thieves and Thieving,” in the “Cornhill Magazine,” and _apropos_ of this benumbing atmosphere of dread, that constantly encompasses even the old “professional,” he says:— “But if an acquaintance with the thieves’ quarters revealed to me the amazing subtlety and cleverness of the pilfering fraternity, it also taught me the guilty fear, the wretchedness, the moral guilt, and the fearful hardships that fall to the lot of the professional thief. They are never safe for a moment, and this unceasing jeopardy produces a constant nervousness and fear. Sometimes when visiting the sick, I have gently laid my hand on the shoulder of one of them, who happened to be standing in the street. The man would ‘start like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons,’ and it would take him two or three minutes to recover his self-possession sufficiently to ask me ‘How are you to-day, sir?’ I never saw the adage, ‘Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind,’ so painfully illustrated as in the thieves’ quarter, by the faces of grey-haired criminals, whose hearts had been worn into hardness by the dishonouring chains of transportation. When, in the dusk of the evening, I have spoken to one of them as he stood idly on the public-house steps, I have spoken in a low and altered tone, so that he might not at first recognise me: again the guilty start as the man bent forward, anxiously peering into my face.”