another section of English raffs, in the Maison de
Détention pour Dettes. My "relations" with the
police were of the most tranquillising description.
I assured a stout gentleman in a glazed cap, at
the passport office of the Petits Sablons, that I
considered the Emperor Napoleon to be the
greatest man this world has seen since Alexander
of Macedon; and as I had just returned from the
most absolutist country in Europe, I was probably
looked upon as a pacific character. So I took
my walks abroad, unmolested, and made my first
acquaintance with Belgian law one October afternoon,
when, ascending the Montagne de la Cour,
I witnessed the edifying spectacle of a little
ragged boy—a pure Belgian gamin—being
arrested by a police agent in plain clothes, for the
flagrant misdeed of begging. The tiny criminal
had ventured to accost an English lady and
gentleman who were coming out of a lace-shop, when
a seeming well-to-do bourgeois, with green
spectacles and a drab broad-brim, rushed across the
road, pursued the small ragamuffin among the
wheels of several carriages and the hoofs of a
squadron of Belgian heavy cavalry, and, at last,
run him down on a pastrycook's door-step. I
never saw such an illustration of abject,
exhausted terror, as in the boy as he sprawled
panting on the step, holding up his ragged little
arm as if to avert an expected blow. There was
some sympathy evinced among the crowd that
immediately collected, and a few murmurs reflecting
on "les mouchards" were heard; but the
police agent—and a very decent kind of man he
seemed—put the case very fairly to us: that his
orders were to arrest all vagrants and mendicants,
and that the boy was captured, not to be punished,
but to be sent to an asylum where he would be
educated and cared for, till he was eighteen years
of age. He took off his prisoner, and I went on
my way: thinking that it was, perhaps, better,
after all, to catch up these little beggars and lug
them away to a place where they should be fed
and taught, than to suffer them shamefully to
roam in "all the desolate freedom of the wild ass"
about the streets of crowded cities, to grow up into
wolves and tigers preying upon the body politic.

I was out late that evening and night, and
walked many miles. It must have been near
the Porte de Cologne, and at half-past one o'clock
in the morning, that I met Mynheer van Prig.

Mynheer van Prig—I can see him now
staggering along, and throwing a long lurching
shadow in the bright moonlight—was either very
tipsy, or else, for purposes of his own, simulated
extreme inebriety. He caught hold of posts,
and of chairs, and of trees, as he came tacking
towards me, and, finally, he drifted up against
and caught hold of me. He was at least six feet
high—I won't say in his stockings, because
subsequent discoveries proved him to be in the
habit of wearing sabots without hose. He wore
a very ragged blouse, and had a white flat
face without beard or moustache, and, to the
extent that a dirty Greek cap would admit of
examination, without any perceptible hair on his
head. He spoke very thick, which might have
been his misfortune only, seeing that he was a
Belgian; and he asked me, in execrable French,
the way to the Cathedral of St. Gudule.

I told him, with my usual mildness, that he
was some two miles distant from that ancient
fane; whereupon, with many a reel and hiccup,
he suggested that I should treat him with beer or
schnaps. I declined; whereupon he cursed me
for an Englishman, and lurched away. It was
not until he was some ten yards ahead of me,
scudding away in the moonlight with a direct
swiftness very unlike a tipsy man, that I
discovered that this villanous mynheer—he became
then and there, and for ever afterwards, to my
mind, Van Prig—had picked my pocket.

I had much better have let it alone, but I gave
chase. I have run away from a good many things
in my time—from love, from happiness, from
myself—but I have seldom run after anybody or
anything. But I cried havoc, and let slip the
dogs of war, after Van Prig: for the rascal had
positively stolen all the money I had in the world.
I think the available "all" amounted to about
five-and-twenty francs, Belgian currency,
contained in a morocco porte-monnaie; but this had,
in addition, one compartment filled with what
North of England people call "bonny money:"
an assortment of small change of a special
nature which I had picked up during my wanderings.
Thus, I had a kreutzer, and a silver groschen,
and a Danish rigsdaler, a pfenning, a five
kopeck piece, a Hamburg mark, a piece with the
effigy of the Hanoverian White Horse, and some
minor testoons. Mynheer van Prig had got
them all; and as I naturally set store by my five-
and-twenty francs, and the pretty little tiny
kickshaws of "bonny money," I ran after him.

Mynheer van Prig doubled; and we had an
agreeable game of catch 'em who can, on the
broad boulevard. I shouted "Police!" and "Au
secours!" but all Brussels seemed to have gone
to bed. Then, Mynheer van Prig took an
unhandsome advantage of his size and my unreadiness,
and, butting at me with his large head, very
nearly knocked me off my legs. I am ashamed
to say that in my ignorance of the noble art of
self-defence, I caught hold of my adversary by
the ears, and by the scruff of his neck, and by
the collar and breast of his blouse, and that I
strove to trip his long legs up: hanging on to
him, meanwhile, like grim death, and bellowing
"Au secours!"

It was destined to be a running fight throughout;
for anon, and to my great joy, I descried
another figure running towards us. Up he came at
last, in a cocked-hat and out of breath, and, mild
as the moonbeams, he summoned Mynheer van
Prig, in the name of the king and of the law, to
surrender.

How did he know that Van P. was the guilty
party? I became ashamed of my opponent. There
was surely never so rank a coward in the world
as Mynheer van Prig. The police-officer was a
mere atomy of a sergent de ville; and Prig, to