what can such a child be guilty? They It was but too true. I had been robbed. Nor have I recounted the extent; for, on arriving at home, I found that I had also lost a white cambric handkerchief, and a silk snuff handkerchief; and my wife, making a further examination, discovered that I had lost my gold spectacles and case, a diamond shirt-pin, a box of Tolu lozenges, which I had purchased in the morning, and a handsomely bound edition of Isaak Walton's delightful "Treatise on Angling." But where, and when. I could have lost all these things -by what means, and by whom I could have been robbed-I was utterly at a loss to conjecture. I remained in this condition of perfect innocence and bewilderment as to the nimble fingers that had picked my pockets, till this morning, when, casually looking over a newspaper, of a week or two back, I alighted upon the following Police Report: "PRECOCIOUS CRIME AND IMPUDENCE.-At the Mansion House, three boys, the eldest only eleven, and the two others under nine years of age, were charged with picking pockets. A lad had, to his surprise, seen one of them slide a small stick into the pocket of a gentleman, and open it for inspection; and he had seen the process repeated on several succeeding customers, but, as it chanced, without disclosing any prospect of spoil. The two companions kept close, covering their leader's operations, and ready to receive his booty and make off as fast as possible. "On this statement being made, the smallest of the boys exclaimed, 'Don't you believe a word he says, my lord; it's all nothing but out-and-out lies." "Lord Mayor. stick for? full in the face, assured him that their accu- "Boy. Don't do that. If you let me 5, you shan't have me any more, I'll promise you? "Lord Mayor. 'No; you shall have some protection. As for the other two, they shall be whipped in the presence of their parents, who are here, and discharged." A light-a lurid beam, but still a lightbroke upon me, as I laid down the paper, and snatched off my spectacles. The children !-the little objects looking in at the print-shop in Cockspur Street—looking in at Sir Robert Peel-and the Madonna-and lurking round about, behind me!—those were the poor innocents who had so adroitly dipped into my pockets, and relieved me of the contents. Those were the London Sparrows, who "grubbed about" the streets for their victuals in the day, and picked up whatever they could find by night! To think of a gentleman at my time of life, being robbed by infants of eight or nine years of age!-and to think of a wise and paternal government being able to devise no better remedy for so shocking an employment for infants, than that of giving them a whipping! Discoursing on these matters last night at my club, there happened to be present a gentleman, (Mr. Joseph Tweezer,) a member of the Statistical Society, who had paid much attention to the subject of infant thieves, and he informed me, that the fact, of which I made so much, though it might be much to me on account of the loss, was dried sprats from a fishmonger's, simply a common occurrence. "Yes, sir," said I, "but, if I seem to make much of it, you must also add my first shock at such very early depravity-a depravity that makes but one step between the cradle and the gallows! Surely, Mr. Tweezer, you do not call that a common occurrence?" watching a moment when nobody was in the shop. He was caught by a policeman happening to pass the door just as he darted out with his prize. But the sprats were not found upon him. He had contrived to get rid of them, the instant he found himself seized. When the magistrate asked him what he had to say for himself, he replied, HeAx fifty-two (the number of the policeman) what he has to say, your worship, for taking hold on a hinnocent boy in that way, all for nothink? The magistrate was amazed. For nothing! you little rascal,' said he; why, did you not steal a bundle of dried sprats? No, your worship, not a bit on it-on my hoath, if I did.' The mag. istrate fixed his eye upon the little imp. Then what did you do in the shop?" said he, why did you go in there when nobody else was in sight?' Without an instant's hesitation, the imp aforesaid replied, ‘A boy flung my cap into the shop for a lark-and I went arter it-that's all, your worship!" But this," said I, "did not get him off?" Mr. Tweezer assured me that it was. told me he had often attended at the Police Courts, and had been an eye and ear-witness to scenes quite equal to the one I mentioned having recently read in a newspaper police report. Only two days ago he was present when a little boy of nine years of age was brought up for examination. It was proved that he had robbed a till in a shop in broad day, and while the shopman was there. He had watched the man till he moved away from behind the counter, and then dropping on all-fours, the diminutive thief crawled along the floor on his hands and knees, got underneath the counter, and raising one hand, softly drew out the tilldrawer, and took three shillings and sixpence. He would have got safe off, but for a customer entering the door just as he was creeping out. "Dreadful precocity!" said I. "My oil and Italian merchant told me that a short time ago three little boys came to his shop door, and begged in the most eloquent terms, for a half-penny, "to buy a bit of bread." He did not give them the half-penny, but he gave each of them a piece of bread. They had been gone about five minutes, when he discovered they had stolen a bottle of olives to eat with it. He consoled himself, how ever, with the reflection that the boys, no doubt, took the olives for preserved gooseberries, or nice plums; so that whether they ate them direct out of the bottle, or had a pudding made of them, the expression of face with which he knew they would look at each other on the first mouthful, would well repay him for the loss. But as to the impudence of infant thieves, even in the presence of the magistrate, of which you tell me, surely this is not a common occurrence?" "It continually happens," replied Mr. Tweezer: "I once saw a little imp, of not more than ten years of age—and very small even for that age-brought before the magistrate for attempting to steal a bundle of "Of course not," replied Mr. Tweezer; “his defence was received with a burst of laughter, and he was ordered two days' imprisonment, and to be whipped." "Some private room, then, is attached to the magistrate's office for this summary process of whipping;" said I, “and the boy is afterwards taken to a place of confinement near at hand, I suppose?" "Oh, by no means," exclaimed Mr. Tweezer; "don't imagine that matters are conducted in any such simple, convenient, and inexpensive form as that. Something elaborate, costly, and quite unnecessary, is the rule on these occasions. There is no private room attached to any magistrate's office for the summary castigation of infant criminals; neither are they confined in any House of Correction near at hand, for the four-andtwenty, or eight-and-forty, hours' imprisonment, which they are sometimes ordered. No, no; a far more imposing paraphernalia is considered requisite. The little urchinand, of course, it often occurs that there is only one-is duly conducted to the huge, black, close-covered police-van, with its pair of fine horses, coachman, police-guard outside behind, and, perhaps, a second policeman seated inside along with the prisoner.' Away they drive, in dark solemnity, through the streets, the observed of all observers,' | women of all ages, as well as hundreds of and take their way to Westminster, and boys of all ages, from six to fifteen; many then through a variety of squalid streets and of these are ordered imprisonment for periods ways, till they arrive at the great Tothill of two or three years; and when this is the Fields Bridewell. The massive gates are case, they are each taught to read and write, unlocked-inward rolls the sombre van- and are instructed in some trade, according more gates are unlocked--the prisoners are to the aptitude they evince. In many inordered to alight-and, behold! out gets a stances-for picking pockets, you know, my little, dirty, ragged, trembling, half-fledged dear sir, requires an expert hand, especially London Sparrow, and is deposited on the when they contrive to take every thing a broad gravel-walk leading up to the Gov- gentleman has about him-in many instances, ernor's house! He is then left standing, therefore, the prisoners became skillful workwith scared looks, staring round at the great men, so that on leaving the prison, they are stony solitude of dead walls and blind build- able to earn an honest living. And this, at ings, and walls with black chevaux-de-frise | least fifty per cent. of them are found to do.” of iron along the tops of them, till relieved by the arrival of an officer, who conducts him to his apartment,' where in presence of his medical attendant,' he is duly introduced by the proper officer to his birchrod,' and is then placed in solitary confinement during the remaining four-and-twenty hours of the term of his sentence !" "And you have seen all this, sir ?" said I. "No," replied Mr. Tweezer, "not with my own eyes. I have never been to Bridewell; but I was told it all-in fact, the whole scene was described to me, and many such, by one of the policemen who attended the van, and was, no doubt, indignant at so much trouble, expense, and formality for so insignificant a result. He was a very largemade, powerful man-has since left the force,' and gone as porter on the Great Western Railway." But, good heavens, Mr. Tweezer !" exclaimed I, "can a wise and paternal government devise no better machinery than all this for the prevention of juvenile and infant crime? Prevention do I say?-why there's no attempt at prevention in this. It is simply a costly arrangement for inflicting small punishments, the effect of which may not, perhaps, be of much longer duration than the period of confinement-unless, indeed, it tends to harden and exasperate, and render the culprits more cunning for the future." "You are quite right," replied my friend Tweezer, as to the view you take of these trivial and numerous punishments of the infant thieves; but you are not doing justice to the arrangements of the Tothill Fields Bridewell, if you suppose they do no more than this. In this prison are hundreds of "But, my dear sir," said I, "excellent and comforting as all this is, which you tell me, it really seems like beginning at the wrong end. First, the paternal government allows its children to become thieves without a single effort at prevention; and then, when prevention is a work of very great difficulty, and requires a great expenditure of monev and time, to produce a doubtful result-o only fifty per cent. of ultimate good-then, only, the idea of education, instruction, and training in moral and personal habits, seems to occur to the sagacious brains of our legislators. Look at the scurvy sum granted for what they dared to call National Education and look at the taxes I pay for all sorts of other things! Protection, forsooth! and taxes for the Public Service!' why are my contributions to the public service of so little good to me, in respect of the safety of my personal property, that I must needs pay, in addition, the sum total of a gold watch— a silver snuff-box-two handkerchiefs-a diamond shirt-pin-a pair of gold spectacles -a box of Tolu lozenges, and a handsomely bound copy of Izaak Walton's Complete Angler,' in order to be protected, in certain statistical ratios and degrees, from a similar occurrence.uture, which may, nevertheless, happen to-morrow!" From the "Albion." CONFESSIO AMANTIS. BY C. G. LELAND. CENTURIES have roll'd away You ask what has been uppermost in the talk for the week gone by? Indeed I can hardly say; for the chat has varied like the complexion of our May-day sky, which "Now shows all the beauty of the sun, And by-and-by, a cloud takes all away." The anniversaries of, I know not how many societies for all sorts benevolence have come up in their periodic march upon the hearts and purses of the town,-have filled our churches with listeners in bombazine-our hotels with demure and charitylooking faces, and our streets with black coats and starchy figures. The speeches, which as they run year after year in the same equable current of expostulation, gratulation, and expositionwere of the same general mark and meaning as in the years gone by. And if I were to except to any thing in their mode or tenor, it would be to drop a hint toward the reform of those young country clergymen who make the May gathering in the city an occasion for a very labored and unnecessary oratorical display. What the special result of this year's impetus may be in the way of renewed and renewing subscriptions, I am not able to tell you; but trust and hope it may be large enough and free enough to help forward what is deserving, and to add to the city reputation (and it surely has this reputation) for open-handed alms-giving. JENNY, as you may well have imagined, has been ruling hearts and purses as she has been ruling ears, and has added to the fashionable triumphs of a season in Havar a and New Orleans, those other and soberer triumphs which have made worship- of London; and Americans who thronged pers of all the staid clericals, who are just the opening are now enjoying (if enjoyment now pendulating between Castle Garden it be the dense throngs of the metropolis and the Theologic book-stores. and picking their way along the side-ways of the Strand. Good music, above all, such music as flows from the throat and the soul of the Swede, cannot fail to warm a preacher's heart into a newer and finer estimate of his duty, and of the capacities of our nature; and so we may hope that JENNY's voice may reach through the Doctors, who have glowed in the hearing of her song, to many a little back-congregation,-like the echoes of an angel's pæan. To tell you that concerts have been thronged that it has been commercial distinction to sell her tickets-that railways have doubled their carriages-that steamboats have wallowed to their very guards with the freight that the Nightingale has set afloat-would be only to repeat what meets your eye in every day's journal. I may tell you though, that this—the lionne of the time has been met here and there, since her return, in quiet morning receptions, and that her winning, frank, and unpretending way has inspired just that sort of regard which a young woman of modesty and worth is honored in claiming. Tripler Hall, you will perceive, has come in for a share of the concerts; but popular taste, if I do not greatly misguage, declares strongly for the large area, cool breezes, and free movements belonging to Castle Garden. Critics may love better the straitened walls of the Hall, which do not allow an echo to wander, but native ears love better the full dome by the water where the warblings of the charmer are mellowed by the waves, and the air of ocean fans the song of the syren. If the projector of the up-town Hall had possessed the good taste and the shrewdness to give Jenny's name to his mausoleum of concerts--instead of perpetuating his vanity by a designation that has neither grace, propriety, nor approval-the Hall might have been a favorite, in spite of cramped passages and poor ventilation: as it is, we are afraid it must be reckoned one of those magnificent failures, which people wonder at and neglect. We are just now in the hearing of that buzz (coming over two thousand miles of ocean) which opened the great exhibition It is a pretty sensation which steals over a man's brain when he first sets a foot on Fleet-street-old Fleet-street, out of which burly JOHNSON used to roll into his outlying court, and upon which, now-a-days, glisten the windows of such familiar men as TILT and BOGUE;-yet I will venture there is many a stranger there now, who, between the mud and the mass, the thick fog and the oozing funds,-would be glad to set a foot again upon the cheerful side-ways of our sunny city. Talking of the new experiences which overtake a man upon the other side of what was ocean-until the Pacific made it a river I must draw your attention to poor GREELEY'S account of his seasickness, and his first voyage. There is something rich in looking at the every-day's table-observations of a man who has so long been philosophizing in his earnest, but self-confident way, about society and order. I dare say you may have seen the man about our streets, in his old gray hat, and his brown wrapper, with the collar awry, and his boots gaping at the toes, and his light silky hair dressed by the wind, and his keen mild eye bent upon the pavement, and his step as unsteady as that of a paralytic;—well, fancy this man, who is used to the openness of sky, and whose foot was learned among the furrows of a plough transferred to the luxurious salon of an Atlantic steamer, and cooped through a fortnight of eastern winds and driving spray in the steam-smelling state-room of a hospital ship! But lest you may not have lighted your country gravity with the mirth of his record, I shall give you a spice of it here; and the better to smack the pungency of it, I would advise the cotemporaneous reading of the driest of one of his essays on Protection to American Industry :— "So long as I was able I walked the deck and sought to occupy my eyes, my limbs, my brains with something else than the sea and its perturbations. The attempt, however, proved a signal failure. By the time we were five miles off the Hook I was a decided case; another hour laid me prostrate, though I refused to leave the deck; at six o'clock a |