Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 1).djvu/124



HERE was a time when the owners of craft on the Thames practically left their backdoors open and invited the river-thieves to enter, help themselves, and leave unmolested and content. The barges lay in the river holding everything most coveted, from precious cargoes of silk to comfortable-looking bales of tobacco, protected only from wind, weather, and wicked fingers by a layer of tarpaulin—everything ready and inviting to those who devoted their peculiar talents and irrepressible instincts to the water. Goods to the value of a million sterling were being neatly appropriated every year. The City merchants were at their wits' end. Some of the more courageous and determined of them ventured out themselves at night; but the thieves—never at a loss in conceiving an ingenious and ready means of escape—slipped, so to speak, out of their would-be captors' hands by going