Free McLevy by James McLevy

lambs”, and were led very quietly to their destination in
the High Street. Remitted to the Sheriff, their doom was fourteen years.
    “And the breath of their nostrils shall find them out.”

The Child-Strippers
    ❖
    H ow different are the estimates people form of mankind! Some say that the world is just very much as you take it—the old notion that truth is
just as you think it. If you wear a rough glove, you may think all those you shake hands with are rough in the palms; and if you wear a soft one, so in the other way; and no doubt if you grin in a
glass, you will get a grin in return—if you smile, you will be repaid with a smile. All very well this in the clever way; but I’ve a notion that there are depths of depravity not to be
gauged in this short plumb way, just as there are heights of perfection not to be got at by our own estimates of ourselves. As for the general “top-to-toe rottenness” so congenial to
some religious sects, why there’s a little truth there too—at least I would look sharp at a man who could turn his eye in and about his own heart, and just say, with a nice smirk,
“Well, I am glad to find that man is an angel after all.” It is as well for me anyhow that I am not given to making a kaleidoscope of my heart, turning up only varieties of beauty,
without considering that a few hard pebbles form the elements of the fine display, otherwise how could I have had any belief in the existence of such beings as Kate Lang and Nell Duff. I would as
readily have believed in M. Chaillu’s account of the Gorillas; only these optimist gentry do admit, with a smile of satisfaction, that a hungry tiger is not to be trusted with a live
infant—no more is Kate Lang, say I.
    The practice of child-stripping, which is not so common now, is one of those depths of depravity to which I have alluded. It is not that there is so much cruelty done. It forms a fine subject
for very tender people who wail about the poor innocents left shivering in their shirts. But there is more fancy than fact here; they don’t shiver long in a crowded city; nay, the stripping
is sometimes productive of good, in so much as the neighbours contrive to get the victim pretty well supplied with even better clothes than those stolen. There is more sympathy due to the case
which happens sometimes where a heartless thief makes off with the clothes, shirt and all, of a bather, about the solitary parts of Granton; for here the situation of the victim is really terrible.
To run after the thief is nearly out of the question as regards success, even if he could make up his mind to a chase in his very
natural
condition; nor is his remaining remedy much
better—a walk so unlike that of Adam through Paradise to the nearest house, a mile off, where he must knock at a door, drive away the opener with a scream, bolt like a robber into a bed-room,
and get a walk home in a suit of clothes in which his friends cannot recognise him. Our feelings depend often upon such strange turns of thought, that a case of this latter kind, so replete with
even agony, can scarcely be told without something like a smile working among the gravely-disposed muscles of the face of the hearer; while that of the child, almost always left its
skin
linen, is viewed with indignation and pity. I cannot explain this difference; but it is not difficult to see how, independently of the rather exaggerated notions we entertain of the condition of
the victim, the crime of child-stripping should be visited with the execration it generally meets.
    In 1838, and thereabouts, this offence of child-stripping increased to an extent which roused the fears of mothers. The depredators were of course women. My only doubts were, whether there were
more than one; for, as I have taken occasion to remark, all such peculiar and out of the way offences are generally the work of some one ingenious artiste; and if more are concerned, they are only
parties to a league in which the