zeal, assiduity, and stratagem of all the runners in Bow Street. In one fact all, however, agreed-that all the forged notes could be traced to one man, always disguised, nearly always successful, always inscrutable, always inaccessible. Schutz's gang one man? Impossible! There were forty of them.

In 1780 the Bank offered two hundred pounds for Old Patch's apprehension. The bill described him and his mistress in the following way—

"He appears about fifty years of age, about five feet six inches high, stout made, very sallow complexion, dark eyes and eyebrows, speaks in general very deliberately, with a foreign accent; has worn a black patch over his left eye, tied with a string round his head; sometimes wears a white wig, his hat flapped before, and nearly so at the sides, a brown camlet great-coat, buttons of the same, with a large cape, which he always wears so as to cover the lower part of his face; appears to have very thick legs, which hang over his shoes as if swelled; his shoes are very broad at the toes, and little narrow oldfashioned silver buckles, black-stocking breeches, walks with a short crutch-stick with an ivory head, stoops, or affects to stoop very much, and walks slow, as if infirm; he has lately hired many hackney coaches in different parts of the town, and been frequently set down in or near Portland Place, in which neighbourhood it is supposed he lodges.

"He is connected with a woman who answers the following description: She is rather tall and genteel, thin face and person, about thirty years of age, light hair, rather a yellow cast in her face, and pitted with the small-pox, a downcast look, speaks very slow, sometimes wears a coloured linen jacket and petticoat, and sometimes a white one, a small black bonnet and a black cloak, and assumes the character of a lady's maid."

Let us now return to Tothill Fields Bridewell, where Price, alias Old Patch, alias Wigmore, alias Wilmott, alias Brank, alias Bond, alias Parks, alias Powel, alias SCHUTZ, sits brooding over all possible turns and doubles to avoid those keen hunters, Bond and Clarke, Sir Sampson, Mr. Acton, and that nameless man with the sinewy, nimble hands, and the rope noose but half concealed behind his back.

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-ail. He, and he alone, had planned and worked these endless forgeries. The depraved Ulysses of London is the parrot-nosed, nutcrackerfaced 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 between the outer and inner soles. "Destroy everything."

letter to Mrs. Poultney The letter merely said,

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 & Co.'s disguises, and sprinkled them with water from a cullender to prevent their blazing. She reduced them first to a charred mass, and so to a brown powder. She sent the engravingpress 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 recognize 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 tickets 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 directors. Their annual gains by losses, fires, storms, 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, in 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, but two terribly indicative

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

He

"His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate. 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 harmless children, on the plea of the Danish pamphlet and his own innocence. The third paper was a letter to the governors of the prison, 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 cross-road near the prison soon after his death; but a few days later, the empty shell was found outside 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, writing 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 had acquired the knack of disguising himself from the constant habit of trying on clothes and playing tricks as a boy in his father's shop in Monmouth Street.

THE BATTLE OF VINEGAR HILL.

In

IN April, 1798, there was scarcely a farmer's house where pretty Irish girls, with frightened glances at the windows, were not cutting up rolls of innocent green ribbon into rebel cockades for the hats of fathers, brothers, and lovers. There was scarcely a lonely moonlit bawn, or old Danish encampment, where wild striplings, armed with pikes, were not practising the right and left wheel, the rallying square, or the charge. Down many a rough country lane, between the desolate stone walls, cars were jolting with clattering loads of pike-handles. On many a mountain, from Benabola to the Scalp of Wicklow, bonfires were heaping, and stern-faced men were muttering threats against the Protestants. many a roadside chapel, behind bolted doors, grim-looking priests, with faces steeled to the work, were blessing halfnaked, ragged, headstrong pikemen who were to begin the holy work and face the swinging yeomanry sabres twenty-four hours after. In dismal cabins, mere holes in the bank roofed with turf, or in hidden places between the deep chocolatecoloured trenches in the bogs, where the snipe whistled, and the wild cotton ruffled white, many a rebel forged the pikehead, kissed the green ribbons, adjusted his talisman against bullets, or said his Aves in supplication to the Virgin that he might be guarded from the yeomanry bayonets on the morrow. The Curragh of Kildare was darkening with savage pikemen ; on the Wicklow mountains they were gathering in force; Limerick was alight; even in Ulster and Down there was danger; but the central crater was Wexford, for there every third man was in arms against the red-coats. From the mouth of the Slaney to Enniscorthy, from Hook Head to Dunbrody, the pikes were assembling, and the green sashes waiting for the fiery signals.