could be faithful to me.’  And thus, bidding the drawer bring fresh glasses, Ellen Roach would end her story.  Though she had told it a hundred times, at the last words a tear always sparkled in her eye.  She lived without friend and without lover, faithful to the memory of Sixteen-String Jack, who for her was the only reality in the world of shades.  Her middle-age was as distant as her youth.  The dressmaker’s in Oxford Street was as vague a dream as the inhospitable shore of Botany Bay.  So she waited on to a weary eld, proud of the ‘Green Pig’s’ well-ordered comfort, prouder still that for two years she shared the glory of Jack Rann, and that she did not desert her hero, even in his punishment.

III—­A PARALLEL

(Gilderoy and sixteen-string jack)

Their closest parallel is the notoriety which dogged them from the very day of their death.  Each, for his own exploits, was the most famous man of his time, the favourite of broadsides, the prime hero of the ballad-mongers.  And each owed his fame as much to good fortune as to merit, since both were excelled in their generation by more skilful scoundrels.  If Gilderoy was unsurpassed in brutality, he fell immeasurably below Hind in artistry and wit, nor may he be compared to such accomplished highwaymen as Mull Sack or the Golden Farmer.  His method was not elevated by a touch of the grand style.  He stamped all the rules of the road beneath his contemptuous foot, and cared not what enormity he committed in his quest for gold.  Yet, though he lived in the true Augustan age, he yielded to no one of his rivals in glorious recognition.  So, too, Jack Rann, of the Sixteen Strings, was a near contemporary of George Barrington.  While that nimble-fingered prig was making a brilliant appearance at Vauxhall, and emptying the pockets of his intimates, Rann was riding over Hounslow Heath, and flashing his pistol in the eye of the wayfarer.  The very year in which Jack danced his last jig at Tyburn, Barrington had astonished London by a fruitless attempt to steal Prince Orloff’s miraculous snuff-box.  And not even Ellen Roach herself would have dared to assert that Rann was Barrington’s equal in sleight of hand.  But Rann holds his own against the best of his craft, with an imperishable name, while a host of more distinguished cracksmen are excluded even from the Newgate Calendar.

In truth, there is one quality which has naught to do with artistic supremacy; and in this quality both Rann and Gilderoy were rich beyond their fellows.  They knew (none better) how to impose upon the world.  Had their deserts been even less than they were, they would still have been bravely notorious.  It is a common superstition that the talent for advertisement has but a transitory effect, that time sets all men in their proper places.