of his conqueror. Now, let honest men say
what they please, I ask where is the industry,
not fostered by the Predatory Art, that would
do so much work as was done in this case
for one penny. A penny having been thus
hardly earned, one is disposed to wonder
what was bought with it, and where the
coin itself is now. It may be in my pocket
or yours, or be in some young child's hand,
making its owner innocently happy.

The simplest form of robbery is that which
is achieved within a house at night. There
has indeed been lately invented an extremely
simple form of in-door robbery by day. The
very marrow of it is simplicity. The master
of a house or any other able-bodied occupant
having been seen to depart, a person calls to
see the mistress, and with an alarming face
demands five shillings for a bottle of furniture
polish or a set of tracts which he admonishes
her she had better buy. Menace of violence
is to a simple woman violence itself, and the
five shillings are earned with little trouble.

Bradlejus lives in a lone country house
surrounded by a garden. At midnight, in
mid-winter he retires to bed—his wife is in
another chamber nursing her sick mother.
Suddenly he is awakened by his wife's cry of
alarm as she enters to him, and at the same
instant five sturdy men, in masks and slops
and navvies' boots, enter his room by another
door. One of the men carries a lantern, one
a candle, the three others weapons; one of
them a life-preserver, with a knob at each
end. They rush straight towards the bed,
and the head of Bradlejus is struck at, but
the wife pushes it from under the first
murderous blow. Three strike on the bed once.
The master of the house holds up a hand to
save his head, and immediately one finger is
broken and disjointed. He escapes, under a
rain of blows, into the space between the
bedside and the wall, and his wife stands
before him and defends him. Husband and
wife both beg for their lives, and offer all.
Bradlejus himself says, "They were pressing
upon my wife, and I was pushing her in
front to keep them off, when I was struck
with a weapon on the arm, which cut through
to the bone. The contest must have lasted
twenty or twenty-five minutes. I then told
them that my money was in my left-hand
trousers pocket." Thirty or forty pounds
having been found in this pocket, actual
violence ceased, and, under threat of repeated
violence, the conquered persons were kept
quiet, and used as assistants in a search for
property worth carrying away. Omitting
faithful report of the oaths used by these
masters of the Predatory Act, I will relate
farther in the words of Bradlejus:—"After
they had rifled my pockets of the money,
they wrenched open the top one of a chest
of drawers in the room, and turned all
the contents on the floor. Among them
were some gold brooches, pins, and old
English and foreign coins, which I had
been all my life collecting. I said, 'Those
are of no value to you,' and one of them
raised his life-preserver, and said something
in a threatening manner. They took the
jewellery and silver coins, but left the copper
ones. They were breaking the other drawers
open, when I offered to open them with my
keys. In one of the drawers were some
deeds of property. I said, ' Don't take those,'
and one of them very politely handed them
back to me. One of them said, ' He's a good
watch, t' old un has—where is it?' I said,
'It is on the table.' They did not seem
satisfied with that, and were turning in an
angry manner towards me, when I put my
hand on the table and handed it to them,
saying, 'The watch is here; I'm not deceiving
you.' They then threatened that if we made
any alarm they would murder us. We
promised faithfully we would not, and they left,
shutting the doors after them. As near as I
can judge they were half-an-hour in our
bedroom. After they left our room they turned
into my wife's dressing-room. One of them
halloaed out, 'Hey, lads, this is the shop,'
and I then heard them all go there, and
there was a noise of breaking open boxes, &c.
While they were ransacking the drawers,
one of the men stood with a revolver pistol
pointed at us and threatened to shoot. I
saw it was my own revolver, and knew it was
not loaded. It had been stolen from a drawer
in the dining-room. Before the men left the
house, they returned to the chamber-door
and said, 'We're going downstairs to get
something to eat; we shall be two hours, and
if you make any noise we'll return and
murder you.' They then went downstairs,
and I think did not remain long there, for
directly after they had gone down several
of the bells were rung by the servant-girls,
and we heard nothing of the men in the
house. Half-an-hour after they had gone
downstairs we went down and found they
were gone. We found that an entrance had
been effected by the dining-room window.
They had broken a pane, and thrown the
sash up, and then attempted to bore through
the shutters, but had failed, because they
were lined with iron. They had then forced
the shutter open with a crowbar. Great
force must have been used. Both back and
front doors had been opened from the inside,
and were left unfastened. The cupboards
and boxes, in which I kept my silver plate,
had all been broken open by a chisel, or some
instrument of that sort. They had taken all
the solid silver articles, and had left all the
plated articles, except a sugar basin and
three pairs of nutcracks."

Here is simple robbery in a form suited to
beginners, since it demands no particular
skill in the Predatory Art. In a lonely house
inhabited by one man, apparently infirm, a
wife, a sick mother, and a couple of maids,
five stout Yorkshiremen enter as five to five,
with odds entirely in their favour. When