Stealth

“ He groped along as stealthily, with as cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber where a man lies only half asleep—or, it may be, broad awake—with purpose to steal the very treasure which this man guards as the apple of his eye. ”

“ SNEAK. The sneak is the practice of robbing houses or shops, by slipping in unperceived, and taking whatever may lay most convenient; this is commonly the first branch of thieving, in which young boys are initiated, who, from their size and activity, appear well adapted for it. To sneak a place, is to rob it upon the sneak. A sneak is a robbery effected in the above manner. One or more prisoners having escaped from their confinement by stealth, without using any violence, or alarming their keepers, arc said to have sneak’d ’em, or given it to ’em upon the sneak. ”

“ On the night previous to your intended departure, a thief enters your house, takes possession of all you have, and makes off, and you never hear of it more. Or suppose you are already on your journey, and after many days of fatiguing travel, find yourself near the place of your destination; when you are met by the highwayman, who, with a pistol at your breast, robs you of your last farthing.—Now I suppose this would be a case, where theft and robbery would stand out in their worst features. ”

“ Dacre.'
'In years perhaps; in feelings but a day. My forefathers came over to steal, and, lord! how well they accomplished it. They stole the whole country—something like a theft, say I—under that prince of robbers whom you have well named the Conqueror. In our secret hearts we all admire a great thief, and if not a great one, then an expert one, who covers his tracks so perfectly that the hounds of justice are baffled in attempting to follow them. ”

“ Their mode of life forces upon them the character of thieves, and all their waking moments are devoted to the one object of making a raid. Whether it be on the meat in the igloo or the storehouse, or the bag of blubber for the lamps, or the seal-skin clothing, it is all the same. They know from experience that the severest penalty will be enforced as a punishment for their offence but to them the pleasure of theft and the exquisite bliss of greasing their stomachs with a slice of blubber outweighs every other consideration. ”

“ For the privilege of perpetuating your stealing from the people--money, bread and butter, hats, shoes, and stockings--for stealing all these things from the people.
(To Knox.) Now, and at last, do I realize how stern and awful is the fight that must be waged--the fight in which you and I, Howard, must play our parts and play them bravely and uncomplainingly--you as well as I, but I even more than you. This is the den of thieves. I am a child of thieves. All my family is composed of thieves. I have been fed and reared on the fruits of thievery. ”

“ If the honest person, as I have shown, was made a thief by striking the hand "over the place" of thieving; and if a person is really made to come to you by your willing the coming—though at the same time, by words, you will him or her not to come—can you not will that he or she shall commit a particular theft, and it will be committed? I say not that any of our mesmerists are so wicked as to will such things; but a science so advantageous to thieves, who require instruments, may fall into very bad hands. ”

“ It is almost our daily experience to learn that, for the sake of obtaining gold and silver, doors are burst open, walls are pierced, wretched travellers are struck down by rapacious and cruel men born to theft, sacrilege, invasion, and robbery. We see thieves seized and strung up before us, sacrilegious persons burnt alive, the limbs of robbers broken on the wheel, wars waged for the same reason, which are not only destructive to those against whom they are waged, but to those also who carry them on. ”

“ Only the thief is more valiant and the honester man of the two.
"And then, when ye are apprehended, nothing but torment ensues; for when ye are once clapt up in gaol, as I have hinted before, you soon come under the hangman's clutches, and he hangs you up, like so many dogs, for using those scaring words, 'Stand and deliver!'
"The effect which theft works in the world to come is eternal, and there is no helping it. ”

“ The thief common and open are those that by such craft live, on whom one does judgment when one takes them. Of such there are many kinds on land and on sea. The hidden thief is he that steals in corners and secretly, great things or little by (their) fighting, or by treason, or by cunning. ”

“ A theft has been committed during the night; no one knows anything of it; the victims of it hasten to look for one of the robber's footprints, and on finding it, they cover it with something to keep the wind from disturbing it. ”

“ If they are not thieves, if they are not tyrants, if they are not men-stealers, I should like to know what is their true character, and by what names they may be called. It is as mild an epithet to say that a thief is a thief, as it is to say that a spade is a spade. ”

“ When day dawned, they told the king: ‘A thief is caught in the trap, but he has no head.’ The king went himself, and saw that in truth the thief had no head, and he was amazed. How could a headless man thieve? Then he commanded them, saying: ‘Take his body and put it in the market place, with sentinels to guard it. Whoever passes by and weeps at the sight of it will be guilty, because it will be a sign of pity for the thief ”

“ There is a strange and startling contrast. “The thief cometh to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that ye may have life.” On the one side is our Lord. Him we know. But who is this thief on the other side who has come, not to give life, but to reduce it, contract it, dilute it—destroy it altogether? ”

“ We have hanged not only the murderer, the ravisher, and the incendiary—​not only the burglar, the highwayman, and the forger, but the sheep-stealer, the petty thief who purloined a roll of cloth or a loaf of bread from a shop-counter. If any nation ought to know how to hang, it should assuredly be the English. ”

“ Dog-stealer, horse-stealer, man-stealer -- can you think of anything so base as a toy-stealer?'
"The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from his pocket and laid it on the table beside the decanter, but still kept his blue reflective eyes fixed on my face.
"`Man!' I said, `all stealing is toy-stealing. That's why it's really wrong. The goods of the unhappy children of men should be really respected because of their worthlessness. ”

“ Quickly and on tiptoe the major stole toward the hall where he could see the front door. It was his hope, his belief now, that the thief would speedily effect an entrance; and from the darkness of his lair the major could see and identify him, let him in, follow him on tiptoe to the dining-room, there seize and confound him in the very act, and so, fastening the crime on some one guilty man, dispel at once and for all the cloud of suspicion that hovered over a woman's fair fame. ”

“ Sordid common villainy, theft, forgery, assault, burglary, cutting and wounding, and passing bad money, make up the bulk of the offences with which the men before us stand charged.
A stout florid-faced man, who looks like a country farmer, and who is gesticulating violently through the bars to the cowed and crying little woman beyond them, is in on a charge of horse-stealing. ”

“ These savages consider a successful piece of theft as a laudable act, and estimate it according to the skill displayed in the accomplishment; like the Spartans, who considered that the dishonour lay not in the act of robbery, but in the discovery of it. ”

“ The thieves know already what will be here revealed, and far more. All who are inclined to enlist in the ranks of professional thieves can readily do so, and by such association and a few years’ imprisonment they will soon graduate in the whole art of stealing. We can teach the habitual thief nothing on this subject. Here and there one naturally inclined to evil may take a hint from what is written; but we cannot refrain from informing the public because one or two may make an improper use of the information. ”

“ His course of life presents us with a melancholy picture—​cunning, roguery, wholesale plunder, and reckless bravado. The old adage of “once a thief always a thief” was exemplified in him.
His thin, firmly compressed lips gave one an impression of a man who, if put to it, would stick at nothing to gain his ends. There was a wolfish look about his face, his eyes appeared more like the eyes of a wild beast than of a human being; he had a good square head and altogether looked like one who had both the head to plan and the hand to carry out any villainy on which he had set his heart. ”

“ You are now numbered One to Seventeen inclusive, and you stand charged with highway robbery, forgery, treason, smuggling, barn-burning, bribery, poaching, usury, piracy, witchcraft, assault and battery, using false weights and measures, burglary, counterfeiting, robbing hen-roosts, conspiracy, and poisoning your grandmother by proxy. ”

“ Upon such a View, the whole appears as a vast Wood or Forest, in which a Thief may harbour with as great Security, as wild Beasts do in the Desarts of Africa or Arabia. For by wandering from one Part to another, and often shifting his Quarters, he may almost avoid the Possibility of being discovered.
Here, according to the Method I have hitherto pursued, I will consider, what Remedy our Laws have applied to this Evil, namely, the wandering of the Poor, and whether, and wherein these Remedies appear defective. ”

“ That a sneak thief should be caught as he was escaping from a house with a few dollars’ worth of plunder, will attract the average reader much less than the fact that he jumped through a plate-glass window in his effort to escape, or that he gained access to the house by wearing a Salvation Army uniform, or that he carried away a pie as part of his booty. ”

“ Just so with theft, robbery, burglary, and all other crimes. Man-stealing is a great crime in one man, or a very few men only. But a whole nation can commit it, and the act becomes not only innocent, but highly honorable. ”

“ It is not usual to awaken a man to steal his property. That man’s hand surely held a knife and he was feeling for my heart! I have always felt sure that the man who entered my room was not an enemy, but a hireling. ”

“ You see, if a thief comes up to a man armed with a revolver, and demands the man's purse, the man produces that revolver, and the thief says, "Pass on, friend." If a thief who has stolen money meets the man he stole it from, or a policeman, and can pull out a revolver, then he can say to the man or the policeman, "Let me pass, or I will shoot you down;" ”

“ Stealing is stealing, whether my son were the thief or another man's. Why shouldn't a man take his punishment? You know the everyday argument: the man who steals a loaf of bread gets nine months, and the man who steals a hundred thousand gets clear. ”

“ The thief having perhaps effected a skilful and elaborate entrance into your dining-room, where he finds no booty but an extinguished lamp and a volume of family prayers, must commit a fresh burglary before he can reach your study, or wherever you keep your small stock of ready money for household expenses ”

“ LONDON DETECTIVE FORCE,
FROM
DICKENS’ “HOUSEHOLD WORDS.”
Part XI.
THE MODERN SCIENCE OF THIEF-TAKING. IF thieving be an Art (and who denies that its more subtle and delicate branches deserve to be ranked as one of the Fine Arts?) , thief-taking is a Science. All the thief’s ingenuity, all his knowledge of human nature; all his courage; all his coolness; all his imperturbable powers of face; all his nice discrimination in reading the countenances of other people; all his manual and digital dexterity; all his fertility in expedients, and promptitude in acting upon them ”

“ But do you hear? look ye, go not to your gills, your punks, and your cock-tricks with it. If I hear you do, as I am an honest thief, though I helped you now out of the briars, I'll be a means yet to help you to the gallows. How the rest shall be employed, I have determined, and by the way I'll make you acquainted with it. To steal is bad, but taken, where is store; The fault's the less, being done to help the poor. ”

“ Thieves that are saved by their books and clergy, for the first offence, if they have stolen nothing else but oxen, sheep, money, or such like, which be no open robberies, as by the highway side, or assailing of any man’s house in the night, without putting him in fear of his life, or breaking up his walls or doors, are burned in the left hand, upon the brawn of the thumb, with a hot iron, so that, if they be apprehended again, that mark betrayeth them to have been arraigned of felony before, whereby they are sure at that time to have no mercy. ”

“ When they have marked their game they wait until the victim is coming out of the ’bus. One thief will put some hindrance in the victim’s way, and while he or she is hindered, apparently by accident, in getting out, the theft is committed. ”

“ Sneak thieves and larger depredators found spoil on every hand. In this terrible calamity each one seemed to throw off his mask, and become what he really was—the brave man, the noble gentleman, the selfish coward, the bully or the thief. ”

“ It is possible that the thief may not find any favorable opportunities hereafter, that another overseer may be more successful, that he may induce you to take stronger measures, and so to intimidate the offender: the robberies may cease: may not malicious persons, may not the offender himself perhaps, to secure himself against all chance of detection, and to frustrate every inquiry, spread a rumour that I am the heinous thief? ”

“ If any one steal property to the amount of one direm, they take from the thief two direms, cut off the lobes of his ears, inflict on him ten blows of a stick, and dismiss him after one hour’s imprisonment. ”

“ Robbery seems to be the fashion; on the one hand masked burglars with pistols at your heads and gags in the mouths of your wife and children, and on the other hypocritical, lying, false-swearing, thieving scoundrels who get your money under fair pretences, and because of your trust in their characters and good faith, and then waste it in speculations and in luxurious living. ”