tradesmen in exchange for goods, we had some
cautionary notices framed, and distributed by
the agency of the police, in which London
tradesmen were warned that any money order
which purported to be of Higher Brickey issue
must be regarded as forged, and that the person
presenting it must be detained.

Precautions taken, it now became necessary
to take steps for the detection of the offenders.
Prom a report which we received from the
postmaster of Waterbridge, on the morning of Monday,
the 15th of May, we derived some information
as to the mode in which the money orders
had been obtained from the post-office at Higher
Brickey, and from the same source we obtained
a description of the man who had thus obtained
the orders, and of a confederate who waited for
him at Waterbridge, whose description tallied
closely with the description of the two men who
had cashed the orders in London. A little
communication with the police superintendent at
the Great Western (we know every man in the
force worth knowing, whether in public or
private service), and a little cross-examination
of the night porters, enabled us to trace the arrival
of these two men at Paddington, from
Waterbridge, on the morning of Saturday, the 13th
of May. But though we thus found reason to
suppose that the offenders were only two in
number, were located in London, and would
ultimately be found in London, it still seemed
desirable that the search for them should be
commenced in Higher Brickey and Waterbridge.
It appeared probable that the men must have
been induced to select a place so little known
as Higher Brickey for the scene of their operations
by some motive personal to themselves
by previous knowledge, for instance, of the
place or of the sub-postmaster and it was
reasonable to expect that we should ascertain
by inquiry on the spot, first, these motives for
the selection of Higher Brickey, and thence by
whom the fraud had been committed. So, with
my mind filled with all the facts, so far as we
knew them, and with certain ideas of how to
work them, I went down to Waterbridge, and
when I returned I was enabled to lay before the
heads of the department the following statement:

On the evening of Thursday, the 11th of May,
two men, the one short and dark, the other tall
and fair, arrived in Waterbridge from
Lowbridge, where, during the day, they had
endeavoured, without success, to obtain a fly
to convey them to Higher Brickey. They had
been drinking rather freely in Lowbridge, and had
become loquacious and incautious. On arriving
in Waterbridge, they went to the Commercial
Hotel, where the fair man remained for the
night. The dark man, after asking the boots of
the Commercial whether Mrs. Dean still kept
the White Hart, and being answered in the
affirmative, went to the White Hart and
engaged a bed for the night. In the course of
the evening he inquired of the attendants for
more than one old inhabitant of Waterbridge,
and he made special inquiry after one Anne
Love, who had oeen, as he said, a servant to
his father. Later in the evening he went out
and sought out two women of the town, whom
he accosted as old acquaintances, but they did
not recognise him, so to one of them he
introduced himself as " Harry Morris," asking her,
at the same time, not to mention that she had
seen him. Before he went to bed he gave orders
that a gig should be in readiness next morning
at nine o'clock to take him to Higher Brickey.
But on the following morning he had slept off
his liquor, and was much less communicative;
and when he set out for Higher Brickey, in
the gig, he cautiously avoided the principal
street, and took a circuitous route through
by-lanes. After calling at a shop in Bannington,
a village through which he passed, and
purchasing a sheet of blotting-paper and a
chamois leather, he drove to the post-office at
Higher Brickey, accosted the sub-postmaster
by name, and desired to be shown into a private
room, and declared himself to be an inspector
from the General Post-office in London. He
had come down, he said, specially to investigate
circumstances connected with the loss of several
letters which had been posted at this office,
and taking some red-tape-tied documents from
his bag, he read, or pretended to read, complaints
from several gentlemen who actually lived in
the neighbourhood, and from a Mr. Hamilton,
of Camden Town, who, he said, had already
written to the sub-postmaster. Denying the
imputations of the resident gentry, the sub-
postmaster was compelled to confess that he
had been in correspondence with Mr. Hamilton
(I ascertained afterwards that Mr. Hamilton
was Morris himself, who had entered into
correspondence with the official for the purpose
of making himself acquainted with his writing,
and practising a forgery of his signature), and the
"gentleman from London," after severely rating
the unfortunate man, told him that he should
"institute a test," and that for the purposes of
this test the postmaster must attend to his
orders for a week.

The postmaster demurred at first, but,

impressed by the accurate official knowledge of the
inspector from London, and awed by his
demeanour, finally consented to do his bidding.
The inspector then asked the postmaster at what
time the night mail would be despatched, and, on
learning the hour, stated he should be present to
see the mail made up, and that, meanwhile, he
should prepare a " test letter" on which he should
require the postmaster to place a private mark
for future identification, for despatch by that
mail. Then, producing another bundle of papers
from his black bag, he began to question the
postmaster as to the nature and extent of his
money-order business, and on learning that on
an average about fifteen orders per week were
issued, he said that under the existing system
the disparity between the numbers of orders
issued at small offices and the numbers issued
at such offices as Liverpool and Manchester
caused much inconvenience to the chief office,
where all the numbers were registered by
machinery, that an important alteration was about