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like Lemoine, or secured an assortment of jewellery sent
down to his ‘wife’ in Gloucestershire, he would disappear
for a time. He liked comfort, and revelled in the sense of se-
curity and respectability. Thus he had lived for three years
when he met Sarah Purfoy, and thus he proposed to live for
many more. With this woman as a coadjutor, he thought
he could defy the law. She was the net spread to catch his
‘pigeons”; she was the well-dressed lady who ordered goods
in London for her husband at Canterbury, and paid half
the price down, ‘which was all this letter authorized her to
do,’ and where a less beautiful or clever woman might have
failed, she succeeded. Her husband saw fortune before him,
and believed that, with common prudence, he might carry
on his most lucrative employment of ‘gentleman’ until he
chose to relinquish it. Alas for human weakness! He one
day did a foolish thing, and the law he had so successfully
defied got him in the simplest way imaginable.
Under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Skinner, John Rex and
Sarah Purfoy were living in quiet lodgings in the neigh-
bourhood of Bloomsbury. Their landlady was a respectable
poor woman, and had a son who was a constable. This son
was given to talking, and, coming in to supper one night,
he told his mother that on the following evening an attack
was to be made on a gang of coiners in the Old Street Road.
The mother, dreaming all sorts of horrors during the night,
came the next day to Mrs. Skinner, in the parlour, and, un-
der a pledge of profound secrecy, told her of the dreadful
expedition in which her son was engaged. John Rex was out
at a pigeon match with Lord Bellasis, and when he returned,

For the Term of His Natural Life