Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/252

236 face of a legal quibble? We every day see men at large, who ought to have been hanged years ago; and yet it would answer the end of no honest man to step up to one of them, and clapping a noose round his neck, run him up at the next lamp post. But if the same culprit were taken up and tried and found guilty of the fact that subjected him to be hanged, what signifies it, the law term that is besiowed upon his crime? There is too much disposition to quibble in our lawyers: common sense and common honesty are oft forgotten in that hateful propensity.

Vaughan was convicted of having, by means of one Davies, a lame petty officer of the navy, induced four youths to break open the house of a woinan with whom Davies cohabited. Their hearts failed them at the door of the premises, and they left the tools behind which Vaughan had furnished to Davies. However, the devoted boys were caught nearly in the fact, not quite; for they had not yet made a breach. This disappointment was foreseen by the wary Vanghan, and a ring belonging to Davies's woman was by him slipped into the pocket of one of the victims; upon which incontrovertible corrobation of the other parts of the evidence the prisoners