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Updated: May 6, 2025
"I can't," he answered. Her brows bent; her little hand seemed to clench. But he stood without looking at her, appearing absorbed in a tiny bit of cloud in the sky. "Very well!" she said, a dangerous glint in her eyes. He looked quite insignificant at the moment; she was far above him; his clothes were threadbare, the way thieves' clothes, or pickpockets', usually are.
Ere the procession reached the end of the dusty plain, the mob had tailed off very considerably, and as the leader of the old white horse pulled him round to return, a fresh commotion in the distance, caused by the apprehension of a couple of pickpockets, drew away the few followers that remained, and the recently applauded and belauded Mr. Jorrocks was left alone in his glory.
One woman, a cross between a beggar and a dealer in second-hand dresses, had four sons, all of whom were pickpockets, but she herself was said to be of spotless honesty. She never allowed them to enter Abner's Court, though every time one of them was in prison she would visit him and bring him food Nor were professional beggars barred from the Court as tenants.
His enthusiasm, however, did not carry him so far as to make him forget the incredible tales that had been related to him about the pickpockets of the capital, and the recommendations which had been made to him on this subject.
They entered the Churchyard and were soon amid a noisy, hustling throng, an assembly composed of clerks and countermen, roughs and pickpockets, with a sprinkling of well-to-do rowdies, and numerous girls or women, whose shrieks, screams, and yelps sounded above the deeper notes of masculine uproar.
They sold immunity to pickpockets, confidence men and burglars, compelled the saloonkeepers to pay for protection, and even extorted from the wretched women of the street and brothels. This was the organization that the ruling class, with its fine assumptions of respectability, now depended upon to do its work of breaking up the political labor revolt.
Mrs Gaff stood for some time waiting anxiously for the result, and as no result followed, she began again to think of thieves and pickpockets, and even meditated as to the propriety of setting up a sudden cry of thieves, murder, and fire, in order to make sure of the clerk being arrested before he should get quite clear of the building, when she became aware of a fluttering of some sort just above her.
Chinamen, with pigtails and loose trowsers; Aborigines, with a solitary blanket flung over them; Vandemonian pickpockets, with cunning eyes and light fingers all, in truth, from the successful digger in his blue serge shirt, and with green veil still hanging round his wide-awake, to the fashionably-attired, newly-arrived "gent" from London, who stares around him in amazement and disgust.
Their dance is a coarse imitation of the gyrations of the professional cancanists, and they prance and cavort with glowing enthusiasm, happy in the evident admiration of a surrounding throng of provincials, pickpockets and prostitutes.
He reads the man accurately, he knows him better than he knows himself, and he effects a cure. "This astonishing condition is certainly a new light for those seeking to labor among men. Those who are successful gamblers, pugilists, pickpockets, saloon-keepers, book-makers, jockeys and the like are so by reason of their intelligence, their innate mental acumen and perception.
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