"Yes, especially when, as in your case, all his soul is in his nose." "And with such a reward!" continued the chagrined officer; "scarcely anything so liberal has been offered in my time; but, after all, the reward is nothing--it is the honour of the force and one's character. It is well up for the night anyhow, and I rather think altogether, unless some flash come by telegraph." "You have no other place you can go to now?" said the superintendent musingly, and not altogether satisfied. "None," replied the officer resolutely. "I have been out of bed for ten nights--every den scoured, and every 'soup-kitchen'[B] visited, every swell watched and dogged, and every trull searched; I can do no more. It is now eleven, my eyes will hardly hold open, and I request to be allowed to go and rest for the present." "As you like," replied the superintendent. "We are neither omniscient nor omnipotent." "The people who get robbed think us both," said the officer; and taking his hat, left the office, and began to trudge slowly down the street. The orderly people had mostly retired to their homes. The midnight ghouls from the deep wynds and closes were beginning to form their gossiping clusters; the perambulators had begun their courses; and fast youths from the precincts of the College or the New Town were resuming their search for sprees, or determined to make them. There were among them many clients of our officer, whom he knew, and had hopes of at some future day; but now he surveyed them with the eye of one whose occupation for the time was gone. His sadness was of the colour of Jacques', but there was a difference: the one wove out of his melancholy golden verses in the forest of Arden; our hero could not draw out of his even silver plate in the dens of Edinburgh. He had come to the Tron Kirk, and hesitated whether, after all, he should renounce his hunt for the night--true to the peculiarity of this species of men, whose game are wretched and wicked beings, always less or more between them and the wind's eye, and therefore always stimulating to pursuit; but again he resolved upon home, or, rather, his heavy eyes and worn-out spirits resolved him, in spite of himself, and he turned south, in which direction his residence was. So on he trudged till he came about the middle part of the street called the South Bridge, when he heard pattering behind him the feet of a woman. She came up to him, and passed him, or rather was in the act of passing him, when, from something no better than a desire to stimulate activity, or rather to free himself from the conviction that he was utterly and entirely defeated, he turned round to the girl, whom he saw in an instant was a street-walker, and threw carelessly a question at her. "Where are you going?" "Home," was the reply. "Where do you live?" "In Simon Square."