Now, Haggart’s ambition was as circumscribed as his ability.  He died, as he was born, an expert cly-faker, whose achievements in sleight of hand are as yet unparalleled.  Had the world been one vast breast pocket his fish-hook fingers would have turned it inside out.  But it was not his to mount a throne, or overthrow a dynasty.  ‘My forks,’ he boasted, ’are equally long, and they never fail me.’  That is at once the reason and the justification of his triumph.  Born with a consummate artistry tingling at his finger-tips, how should he escape the compulsion of a glorious destiny?  Without fumbling or failure he discovered the single craft for which fortune had framed him, and he pursued it with a courage and an industry which gave him not a kingdom, but fame and booty, exceeding even his greedy aspiration.  No Tamerlane he, questing for a continent, but David Haggart, the man with the long forks, happy if he snatched his neighbour’s purse.

Before all things he respected the profession which his left hand made inevitable, and which he pursued with unconquerable pride.  Nor in his inspired youth was plunder his sole ambition:  he cultivated the garden of his style with the natural zeal of the artist; he frowned upon the bungler with a lofty contempt.  His materials were simplicity itself:  his forks, which were always with him, and another’s well-filled pocket, since, sensible of danger, he cared not to risk his neck for a purse that did not contain so much as would ‘sweeten a grawler.’  At its best, his method was always witty—­that is the single word which will characterise it—­witty as a piece of Heine’s prose, and as dangerous.  He would run over a man’s pockets while he spoke with him, returning what he chose to discard without the lightest breath of suspicion.  ’A good workman,’ his contemporaries called him; and they thought it a shame for him to be idle.  Moreover, he did not blunder unconsciously upon his triumph; he tackled the trade in so fine a spirit of analysis that he might have been the very Aristotle of his science.  ‘The keek-cloy,’ he wrote, in his hints to young sportsmen, ’is easily picked.  If the notes are in the long fold just tip them the forks; but if there is a purse or open money in the case, you must link it.’  The breast-pocket, on the other hand, is a severer test.  ’Picking the suck is sometimes a kittle job,’ again the philosopher speaks.  ’If the coat is buttoned it must be opened by slipping past.  Then bring the lil down between the flap of the coat and the body, keeping your spare arm across your man’s breast, and so slip it to a comrade; then abuse the fellow for jostling you.’