And was The Fin convicted and hanged? Not a bit of it. He lived out his sentence and was released, and went about long enough to boast of his deed, though I am bound to confess that few believed him, and the general opinion was that Shorty died of the bit of tobacco pipe without the poison. However, The Fin claimed all the credit, and insisted that he was not to blame for the result, seeing that he did not administer the poison, and that Shorty, in appropriating what he knew was not his own, committed a grave offence against convict society, and could not complain if he suffered for the crime. The Fin should have been a lawyer, and with education might have risen to be one, had he not been soon after choked by an overdose of shebeen whisky. THE BROKEN CAIRNGORM. I had to take Jess Murray for her share in a very bold robbery, in which a commercial traveller, peaceably walking home to his hotel, had been waylaid and stripped of pocket-book, purse, and watch, the haul altogether amounting to upwards of £100 in value, the greater part of which was not his own. The gentleman could give no description of the men, but remembered that they had been assisted at a critical moment by a woman, who, so far as he could judge, was tall and handsome, and not very old. It was the style of the robbery as much as that brief and imperfect description which directed my attention to Jess Murray. She was a bold wench, strong as a lion, and so thoroughly bad that I took the trouble of hating her—an exceptional case indeed, as in general one gets to look upon her kind with as much indifference as a drover does upon a herd of horned knowte, under his care one day and gone the next. I believed Jess to be one of the few who have not one redeeming quality or trait, and was eager for the chance which should put her out of harm’s way for a good long term of years. I had really no evidence, but an instinctive feeling, connecting Jess with the robbery; but when on my way to her place I chanced to pass one of her acquaintances on the street. I let him pass, and then a thought struck me, and I turned back and stopped him. A scared look at once came into his face, so I asked him to come with me—back to the Office. He came reluctantly, and the cause I speedily understood when he tried to throw away behind his back a £20 bank note taken from the pocket-book of the commercial traveller. The number and description of this note was already in my possession, and I picked up the paper money with the most lively satisfaction, when the fellow immediately began to protest that he had only been sent to change the note, and was willing to tell all about the robbery if things were made right for himself.