McLevy by James McLevy

and another
constable from behind. Meanwhile the cries of the little nude, mixed with those of her tiny sisterhood, brought a crowd, who, instantly ascertaining the cause of all the uproar, showered their
indignation on the culprits with a severity that excluded even Irish humour. Nay, so furious were the hen-mothers, that unless we had taken good care of our sparrow-hawks, there would that day have
been more stript than Phemy and her brother-victim of the Watergate; nor would I have answered for discolorations or broken bones. But care was also taken of the tender chicken, who, rolled up in a
shawl, became in the midst of the crowd a little heroine, honoured with more endearing epithets and sympathetic condolences than would perhaps ever fall to her portion again.
    At the top of the street we collected our prisoners, and marched them gallantly up the Canongate and High Street. One likes to possess the favour of the female part of the people, and this day I
got as much of the incense of hero-worship as if I had stopped a massacre of the innocents. I am not sure if some males, too, much given to baby-love, did not glugger with reddened gills in anger
at the spoilers of their wives’ darlings; all which was no doubt heightened by the impression then in the public mind, produced by the repeated accounts of the instances of this nefarious
traffic. The prisoners had even during the previous part of that day committed four strippings of the same kind besides those I had witnessed.
    It was not long till I ascertained that I had been wrong in my original conjecture, and that the whole of these thefts had been perpetrated by a gang. During their confinement, and when we
expected that they would hold out in their denial of guilt, it was quite a scene to witness the identifications. The witnesses were, of course, the little victims themselves, on whose minds the
features of the women had been so indelibly impressed, especially where, like the case of Phemy, “the shurt was a good un,” that they not only knew them, but screamed with terror the
moment they were brought before them. And to the women, no doubt, they were of that kind of terrible infants so well described by the French, the more by reason, perhaps, that among that people the
children have more strange things to see than in our decent country. From searches we got the evidence of the little wardrobes themselves, chiefly through pawns, showing the immense extent of their
assiduous labours. Nor had it been an unprofitable traffic to them; many of the dresses were taken from well-dressed youngsters in the New Town, and you have only to buy those things to know what
money it costs to rigg out a little man or woman in our day, when the children are taught pride and a love of finery with the supping of porridge. But, after all, it came out that we didn’t
need these evidences. The vagabonds broke down in the end under the accumulation of proof, and admitted to I do not know how many strippings. They each got eighteen months’ imprisonment, and
the community was relieved from the cold-blooded and unfeeling practice of child-stripping for a long period afterwards.

The White Coffin
    ❖
    I f the Conglomerates of our Old Town are troubled with many miseries, as the consequences of their privations and vices, it is certain the whole
squalid theatre they play their strange parts in, is the scene of more incidents, often humorous, nay romantic—if there can be a romance of low life—than can be found in the quiet
saloons of the higher grades in the New Town. The observation indeed is almost so trite, that I need not mention that while in the one case you have nature over-laid with the art of concealment,
the slave of decorum, in the other you have the old mother, free, fresh, and frisky—her true characters, rapid movements, quiet thoughts, intertwined plots, the jerks of passion, the humorous
and the serious, the comedy and the melodrama of the tale of