Читать книгу Charles Peace, or The Adventures of a Notorious Burglar онлайн

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During the whole of the melancholy proceedings the pickpockets were industriously plying their vocation.

More than one of the light-fingered gentry had been given into the custody of the police.

This was a common thing at the time of public executions.

Full two-thirds of the multitude had in the space of a quarter of an hour bent their way homewards.

Many, however, still remained to witness Calcraft’s re-appearance on the scaffold for the purpose of cutting the rope from which the body of the murderer was suspended.

Those that remained were, of course, the roughest and least sensitive of the throng.

Their thirst for the horrible appeared to be insatiable.

The unprincipled scoundrel, Gregson, who, as a just penalty for his manifold crimes, suffered death on the public scaffold, was a ruffian of the very worst type. Educated to crime from his earliest youth, his conscience, which had never been tender, became, as years passed over his felon head, “seared as with a hot iron.”

If we were to take a retrospective glance at his career from the day that he first enlisted in the “Devil’s Regiment of the Line” until the last dread sentence of the law was carried out, we should find abundance of evidence to prove that the way of the transgessor was hard. As we have before signified, “A life of crime is always a life of care.”