Haggart led a life of unbroken prosperity under the brisk air of heaven, and, despite the risk of his profession, he remained two years a stranger to poverty and imprisonment.  His worst mishap was to slip his forks into an empty pocket, or to encounter in his cups a milvadering horse-dealer; but his joys were free and frank, while he exulted in his success with a boyish glee.  ’I was never happier in all my life than when I fingered all this money,’ he exclaims when he had captured the comfortable prize of two hundred pounds.  And then he would make merry at Newcastle or York, forgetting the knowing ones for a while, going abroad in white cape and tops, and flicking his leg like a gentleman with a dandy whip.  But at last Barney and a wayward ambition persuaded him to desert his proper craft for the greater hazard of cracking a crib, and thus he was involved in his ultimate ruin.  He incurred and he deserved the untoward fate of those who overlook their talents’ limitation; and when this master of pickpockets followed Barney through the window of a secluded house upon the York Road, he might already have felt the noose tightening at his neck.  The immediate reward of this bungled attack was thirty pounds, but two days later he was committed with Barney to the Durham Assizes, where he exchanged the obscurity of the perfect craftsman for the notoriety of the dangerous gaol-bird.

For the moment, however, he recovered his freedom:  breaking prison, he straightway conveyed a fiddlestick to his comrade, and in a twinkling was at Newcastle again, picking up purses well lined with gold, and robbing the bumpkins of their scouts and chats.  But the time of security was overpast.  Marked and suspicious, he began to fear the solitude of the country; he left the horse-fair for the city, and sought in the budging-kens of Edinburgh the secrecy impossible on the hill-side.  A clumsy experiment in shop-lifting doubled his danger, and more than once he saw the inside of the police-office.  Henceforth, he was free of the family; he loafed in the Shirra-Brae; he knew the flash houses of Leith and the Grassmarket.  With Jean Johnston, the blowen of his choice, he smeared his hands with the squalor of petty theft, and the drunken recklessness wherewith he swaggered it abroad hastened his approaching downfall.

With a perpetual anxiety to avoid the nippers his artistry dwindled.  The left hand, invincible on the Cheviots, seemed no better than a bunch of thumbs in the narrow ways of Edinburgh; and after innumerable misadventures Haggart was safely lodged in Dumfries gaol.  No sooner was he locked within his cell than his restless brain planned a generous escape.  He would win liberty for his fellows as well as for himself, and after a brief council a murderous plot was framed and executed.  A stone slung in a handkerchief sent Morrin, the gaoler, to sleep; the keys found on him opened the massy doors; and Haggart was free with a reward set upon his head.  The shock of the enterprise restored his magnanimity.  Never did he display a finer bravery than in this spirited race for his life, and though three counties were aroused he doubled and ducked to such purpose that he outstripped John Richardson himself with all his bloodhounds, and two days later marched into Carlisle disguised in the stolen rags of a potato-bogle.