As a spectacle it had its points. That deep, dark pool circumscribed by a green and tan track, the focus for the eyes of ninety-five thousand half-wits and five thousand live-by-wits, the curious surging, harsh hum of the Worst Hundred Thousand, the sudden appearance in the distance of half-a-dozen tiny white two-legged figures with still tinier four-legged figures pacing beside them, wandering round the vast arena till they reached a sort of chicken house into which the two-legged hoisted the dangling four-legged, who, stirred by the sound of a bell and the sight of an individual ascending a peculiarly lousy tower, whimpered and grumbled and thrust eager paws through the bars. All this was admirably calculated to put the mugs into the right mood for the crooks’ purposes. I wandered about amongst the excited, liquor-sprung horde, fighting their way to rows of leather-lunged sharps who, wedged like unsavoury sardines, bellowed out their inane jargon, and exchanged pieces of cardboard with their lamentable faces gummed upon them for the silver and paper of the Triumphs of Evolution--and I made up my mind. Some exploiter, a politician as far as I remember, once, in a gust of vote-snatching sentimentality, declared he was on the side of the angels; he would have been hard put to find an ally at the White City, and he would certainly not have found one in me. It would be humiliating and debasing to be a Private in the ranks of muggery, far better to be an Officer and a crook. Only so could I keep my self-respect. I consider that this was the decision of a philosopher and a superior man, and I have never changed my opinion. How to begin? I carefully studied the pages of _Truth_, an organ I have always found most useful; it is an encyclopædia of muggery. Its editor has kept on my track, but he is at a hopeless disadvantage, for there is a sucker born every minute and a reader of _Truth_ perhaps once a day, odds too great even for a Labouchere. The present editor is a charming personality, and I have to thank his ably conducted periodical for many of my most remunerative conceptions, but I’d have liked him in that third coach all the same. I decided to make a beginning with a Begging Letter. It hardly sounded like that, for it was manly, suggesting rows of medals, a patient little wife, and many hostages to fortune. It ended with a pathetic suggestion of suicide, and a defiant repudiation of the dole. I sent this to a carefully selected list, and netted £84 13s. 2d., and then I knew that bounding sense of exhilaration which a man gains from finding that he is destined for success in his life’s work. Shortly after, I noticed one who was clearly a policeman in mufti hanging about, so I changed my address. A week later _Truth_ had a paragraph about me, and was good enough to congratulate me on my epistolary skill, which, it suggested, would eventually bring me to a place where I should have few opportunities of exercising it.