he signs, indeed, no more.  Instead of signature you find, a little later, writ in careful commercial hand, this entry:  ``Mr —–­ did not attend at his office to-day, having been hanged at eight o’clock in the morning for horse-stealing.’’ Through the faded ink of this record do you not seem to catch, across the gulf of years, some waft of the jolly humanity which breathed in this prince among clerks?  A formal precisian, doubtless, during business hours; but with just this honest love of horseflesh lurking deep down there in him —­ unsuspected, sweetening the whole lump.  Can you not behold him, freed from his desk, turning to pursue his natural bent, as a city-bred dog still striveth to bury his bone deep in the hearth-rug?  For no filthy lucre, you may be sure, but from sheer love of the pursuit itself!  All the same, he erred; erred, if not in taste, at least in judgment:  for we cannot entirely acquit him of blame for letting himself be caught.

In these tame and tedious days of the policeman rampant, our melancholy selves are debarred from many a sport, joyous and debonair, whereof our happier fathers were free.  Book-stealing, to be sure, remains to us; but every one is not a collector; and, besides, ’tis a diversion you can follow with equal success all the year round.  Still, the instance may haply be pregnant with suggestion to many who wearily ask each year, what new place or pursuit exhausted earth still keeps for the holiday-maker.  ’Tis a sad but sober fact, that the most of men lead flat and virtuous lives, departing annually with their family to some flat and virtuous place, there to disport themselves in a manner that is decent, orderly, wholly uninteresting, vacant of every buxom stimulus.  To such as these a suggestion, in all friendliness:  why not try crime?  We shall not attempt to specify the particular branch —­ for every one must himself seek out and find the path his nature best fits him to follow; but the general charm of the prospect must be evident to all.  The freshness and novelty of secrecy, the artistic satisfaction in doing the act of self-expression as well as it can possibly be done; the experience of being not the hunter, but the hunted, not the sportsman, but the game; the delight of comparing and discussing crimes with your mates over a quiet pipe on your return to town; these new pleasures —­ these and their like —­ would furnish just that gentle stimulant, that peaceful sense of change so necessary to the tired worker.  And then the fact, that you would naturally have to select and plan out your particular line of diversion without advice or assistance, has its own advantage.  For the moment a man takes to dinning in your ears that you ought, you really ought, to go to Norway, you at once begin to hate Norway with a hate that ever will be; and to have Newlyn, Cromer, or Dawlish, Carinthia or the Austrian Tyrol jammed down your throat, is enough to initiate the discovery that your own individual weakness is a joyous and persistent liking for manslaughter.