But stop! Schutz? Why, this is only
one of the great forgery gang. There are
thirty-nine more still loose in the lairs of London.
We must at last be candid. This Price
was Old Patch himself, Wigmore, Schutz——
all. He, and he alone, had planned and worked
endless forgeries. The depraved Ulysses
of London is that parrot-nosed nutcracker-faced
man you see brooding alone in that dreary
stone-room.

The moment the doors were closed on him,
Price wrote to Portland-street for his wife and
son— a boy of fifteen. Knowing the lad would
be searched, the crafty old thief took off one of
the boy's shoes and slipped a letter to Mrs.
Poultney between the outer and inner soles.
The letter merely said: "Destroy everything."

The tall thin sallow woman was equal to
the occasion. She too was Ulyssean by this
time. She kissed the boy and sent him home,
then glided down to the kitchen of No. 3,
Terrace, and mildly blamed the maid for keeping
the fire so low in such cold weather. She
next ordered her to take the cheeks out of the
grate, and pile on fresh coals, saying she had
just heard from her master that his clothes had
got infected with the plague when he was
abroad, that they were imminently dangerous,
and must be all instantly burned to ashes.
She then brought down all Schutz's, Old
Patch and Co.'s disguises, and sprinkled them
with water from a cullender to prevent their
blazing. She reduced them to a charred
mass, and so to a brown powder. She
sent the engraving-press to a friendly carpenter
adjoining, who had never seen Price. She
then, in the absence of the maid, heated the
copper plates red-hot and broke them into
pieces. These, with the water-mark wires, were
then taken by the son into the fields behind the
house and hidden in dust-heaps: where they
were afterwards discovered.

On his second examination, Patch laughed
at all accusations, and expressed his hope that
"the old hypocrite would be taken." Assured
that none of his dupes could recognise him, he
even sent for many of them to prove his innocence.
One sharp waiter from a City coffee-house,
however, swore boldly to him. Price asked,
unthinkingly, how he knew him. The man replied:
"I will swear to your eyes, nose, mouth, and
chin;" and the next day the mother of one of his
servant-boys swore also to his mouth and chin.
From that moment Price lost hope, and said he
was betrayed; but he engaged an attorney,
and arranged his defence, his plea being that the
alteration of the teller's ticket was only a fraud.
One night, when he sat over his wine with Mr.
Fenwick, the governor of Tothill-fields, he
pulled a ten-pound note out of his fob, and,
ridiculing the carelessness of the searchers, left
the note wrapped round the stopper of the
decanter, as if in assertion of his powers of
trickery.

On the Sunday before the day fixed for his
committal Price borrowed a Bible of the governor,
and prayed with his weeping wife for
five hours. On the day before, he had told his son
to bring him two gimlets to fasten up the door,
as the people of the prison came into his room
earlier than he wished, and while he was writing
private letters. He described all the processes
of bank-note making to Mr. Fenwick, lamented
his temper which had prevented his being worth
a hundred thousand pounds, and defended his
robberies of the Bank; their annual gains by
losses, fires, sea, and by persons dying intestate,
were so great (he said), that it was doing no
one an injury to rob them.

At seven next morning, an old female servant,
going into the prisoner's room, saw Old
Patch m his flannel waistcoat standing by the
door. She said, " How do you do, sir ?" Patch
made no answer. At that moment his body
swung round gently in the draught. He had
hung himself from two hat-screws (strengthened
by gimlets) behind the door.

Under the old forger's waistcoat were found
three papers. The first was a series of meditations
from the Book of Job, some of them
terribly indicative:

"Let the day perish wherein I was born, and
the night in which it was said, There is a man-
child conceived.

"His mischief shall return upon his own
head, and his violent dealing shall come down
upon his own pate. He made a pit and digged
it: he is fallen into the ditch which he
made."

The second paper was a petition to the king,
praying protection for his wife and eight innocent
children, on the plea of the Danish pamphlet
and his own innocence. The third paper was a
letter to the governor of the prison and his wife,
thanking them for their humanity and for their
many and great civilities, and complaining of
the legal tyranny that had destroyed his own
reason and ruined his family.

A razor was found in his coat-pocket.

Mrs. Price betraying the residence of Mrs.
Poultney, she was seized, and the frame and
press were found at a neighbouring blacksmith's.
The frame for paper-making she declared was
an instrument for mangling; and she exclaimed,
in her despair:

"God forgive those who fall into the hands
of the Bank!"

Price was buried as a suicide in the crossroad
near the prison soon after his death; but,
a few days later, the empty shell was found beside
the grave. The widow had removed the
body.

Only one secret of Price's labyrinthine career
remains inscrutable, and that is how the
immense sum he stole (two hundred thousand
pounds) was spent., as he always lived in obscure
lodgings, and neither drank nor gambled.

Hone, wriitng in 1826, says that Price's old
lottery-office was then occupied by Mr. Letchell,
a bookseller, and that shreds of the old lottery
advertisements could still be seen on the
shutters.

One fact in Price's history is noticeable;——
that the rascal acquired the knack of disguising