vulture-beaked man in the tie-wig ruffle shirt,
and buccle shoes entered a bin in Aldus's shop,
and tapped the counter gently with his tasselled
cane. Mr. Aldus at once gave the fatal signal.
Click! the gin closed ; through the swinging
door strode Thomas Ting, Bow-street officer;
and said he wanted to speak to Mr. Powel a
moment, in Mr. Aldus's parlour

Mr. Powel was angry and surprised. Who
was Ting? What was Ting's business ? Ting
was ready to tell him in Mr. Aldus's parlour, and
obligingly offered his arm to guide him there.
Mr. Powel grew violent, and actually swore.
He declared Ting wanted to rob him. Ting replied
he had orders to detain him till some person
arrived from Bow-street, and that the time
might be well spent in searching him. The
forger's passion then subsided; he submitted
with a better grace, and pulled out bank-notes
to the amount of one hundred and fifteen pounds,
with a few guineas. Ting, assiduously and
roughly diving into Powel's dress-coat pockets,
pulling out a parcel of suspicious white tissue
paper, naturally asked what it, was for.

"I bought it,"' said Price (Powel), "to make
my children air-balloons."

But here Powel (Price) grew insolent and indignant.
He swore 'twas "odd," 'twas " mighty
odd;" he reviled Aldus, and vowed he would
bring action upon action against his unjust
detainer, who was now sanguine and went so
far that he was sure he had

                        Old Patch himself
safe in his grip.

At that moment Mr. Clarke entered, and
instantly said:

' How do you do, Mr. Price ?"

At this friendly accosting, Mr. Powel
turned visibly a bluish white, and his tassels
shook audibly. He requested leave to go
himself and break the news to his wife, who lodged
at Mr. Bailey's, a pastrycook's, in Portland-
street, as Mrs. Price was a great invalid, and,
moreover, very near her confinement.

He even offered Ting the hundred and fifteen
pounds (chiefly in notes) as a security for his
immediate return. Ting, obdurate and stolid,
refused the bribe, and led Mr. Price to Sir
Sampson Wright's, still pressed to take the
hundred and fifteen pounds. At Bow-street, Price
was indignant and violent. He accused Mr.
Bond, the clerk, of dislike to him on account of
some old affair about a disputed lottery-ticket,
and he even accused Abraham Newland, the
venerated old cashier of the Bank, of antipathy
towards him. As for Sir Sampson, he told him
that it was needless to run through his history.
They knew well enough who he was, and
if, although he was innocent, he had to submit
to a trial, he would reserve his defence till
then. Upon this, Mr. Charles Jealous and
trusty Ting bundled Price into a hackney-coach,
and, proud of their snared fox, drove him off
to the Tothill-fields Bridewell.

Mr. Price's antecedents were gradually evolved
from their knotty tangle. He was the son of a
Welsh journeyman tailor, who, saving money,
had started an old-clothes-shop at the corner of
East and West-streets, a point of vantage which
commanded no less than four entrances into
Monmouth-streets , that depot of human sloughs,
where, Mr. Carlyle tells us, the thought of that
fine satire, Sartor Resartus, first entered into his
mind. Charles Price, the future forger, was born
about the year 1724. Even at School Charles
had distinguished himself in sharp practice,
tricks, and petty thefts, always outwitting his
elder brother. At sixteen, the dangerous lad
forged a draft, in his father's name, for twenty
pounds, in order to obtain money for a debauch;
his father at last, worn out by his knavery,
apprenticed the untoward boy to a hatter and
hosier in St. James's-street. There, so far from
improving, he grew more recklessly thievish.
Disguised in a suit of his father's, and other
appliances, he one day actually entered his
master's shop as a Mr. Bolingbroke, and
obtained ten pounds' worth of silk stockings.
Upon being discovered, he ran away from his
master, and was renounced by his father.
Promising to reform, his friends then got him a
place as clerk to a foreign merchant in Broad-
street: whom he soon robbed of five hundred
pounds by false entries, and finally fled to
Holland.

Sheltered in that country under the borrowed
name of Johnson, Price, by means of a forged
letter introducing him as heir to a fortune,
wheedled himself into the confidence of a
diamond-merchant at Amsterdam. He seduced
this man's daughter, and stealing five hundred
pounds, returned to England: leaving the
daughter to perish in childbed, and the old
father to die of a broken heart .

This matchless rogue and heartless scoundrel
next comes up to the surface as clerk to a
government brewer at Weovil, near Gosport.
The brewer, delighted with his smooth-tongued,
sharp, and trustworthy clerk, soon offered him
his daughter in marriage. At this auspicious
juncture there appeared on the scene Price's
brother: a greater rascal even than Price himself,
then living at Portsmouth, and his master, a
Jew salesman, who bought prize tickets. These
rogues betrayed his antecedents. Price was
instantly turned out of the brewer's office, and
kicked out of his brother's house, where he had
in vain sought shelter.

Once more in London, his father having in
the mean time died heart-broken, Price, by a
trick, obtained an assignment of a brewery near
King John's-square, Grange-road, Soutnwark,
decoyed Sam Foote, the comedian, into a
quasi-partnership, stole the profits, brought him
into debt five hundred pounds, and decamped.

Price next turned methodist preacher, and
by promises of marriage to a fanatical old maid
at CheIsea, robbed her of three thousand pounds.
Determined to run through the whole gamut of
fraud, this versatile rascal now began a system
of matrimonial advertisements; of which the
following is a specimen, from a paper of 1757 :

To Gentlemen of Character, Fortune, and
Honour, who wish to engage for life with a lady who