Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/33

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This way of obtaining the property of others, is certainly the most genteel, profitable, and alluring of any, because it requires some degree of ingenuity to exercise it properly, and a great deal of address and firmness to get off without detection. Professors of the art are admired for their dexterity, by every one but the immediate losers; and people laugh at the droll way in which the sufferers relate how they were done. I have myself seen two friends just as they found out that one of them had lost his Reader or Tattler;—to see the vacant stare of the one, and the broad grin of the other, was to me as high fun, almost, as the actual possession of the property. Even magistracy itself seldom looks half so glum upon a predatory marauder of this order as he does upon a night robber, a housebreaker, or a highwayman. Whenever the prosecution is brought up to the point of conviction, the prosecutor always leans to the side of mercy; and the capital is "taken off:" one never hears of a pickpocket being hung.

Lagging is the worst they can come to. Lucky dog that I was, in adopting so safe, so genteel,