him to shoot a policeman at Whalley Range, another was sentenced for the crime; and had he not encountered Mrs. Dyson, who knows but he might have practised his art in prosperous obscurity until claimed by a coward’s death?  But a stormy love-passage with Mrs. Dyson led to the unworthy killing of the woman’s husband—­a crime unnecessary and in no sense consonant to the burglar’s craft; and Charles Peace was an outlaw, with a reward set upon his head.

And now came a period of true splendour.  Like Fielding, like Cervantes, like Sterne, Peace reserved his veritable masterpiece for the certainty of middle-life.  His last two years were nothing less than a march of triumph.  If you remember his constant danger, you will realise the grandeur of the scheme.  From the moment that Peace left Bannercross with Dyson’s blood upon his hands, he was a hunted man.  His capture was worth five hundred pounds; his features were familiar to a hundred hungry detectives.  Had he been less than a man of genius, he might have taken an unavailing refuge in flight or concealment.  But, content with no safety unattended by affluence, he devised a surer plan:  he became a householder.  Now, a semi-detached villa is an impregnable stronghold.  Respectability oozes from the dusky mortar of its bricks, and escapes in clouds of smoke from its soot-grimed chimneys.  No policeman ever detects a desperate ruffian in a demure black-coated gentleman who day after day turns an iron gate upon its rusty hinge.  And thus, wrapt in a cloak of suburban piety, Peace waged a pitiless and effective war upon his neighbours.

He pillaged Blackheath, Greenwich, Peckham, and many another home of honest worth, with a noiselessness and a precision that were the envy of the whole family.  The unknown and intrepid burglar was a terror to all the clerkdom of the City, and though he was as secret and secluded as Peace, the two heroes were never identified.  At the time of his true eminence he ‘resided’ in Evelina Road, Peckham, and none was more sensible than he how well the address became his provincial refinement.  There he installed himself with his wife and Mrs. Thompson.  His drawing-room suite was the envy of the neighbourhood; his pony-trap proclaimed him a man of substance; his gentle manners won the respect of all Peckham.  Hither he would invite his friends to such entertainments as the suburb expected.  His musical evenings were recorded in the local paper, while on Sundays he chanted the songs of Zion with a zeal which Clapham herself might envy.

The house in Evelina Road was no mere haunt of quiet gentility.  It was chosen with admirable forethought and with a stern eye upon the necessities of business.  Beyond the garden wall frowned a railway embankment, which enabled the cracksman to escape from his house without opening the front door.  By the same embankment he might, if he chose, convey the trophies of the night’s work; and what mattered it if the windows rattled to the passing train?