ABOUT THIEVES.


It is recorded in the pages of Diodorus Siculus, that Actisanes, the
Ethiopian, who was king of Egypt, caused a general search to be made
for all Egyptian thieves, and that all being brought together, and the
king having "given them a just hearing," he commanded their noses to be
cut off,--and, of course, what a king of Egypt commanded was done; so
that all the Egyptian "knucks," "cracksmen," "shoplifters," and
pilferers generally, of whatever description known to the slang terras
of the time, became marked men.

Inspired, perhaps, with the very idea on which the Ethiopian acted, the
police authorities have lately provided, that, in an out-of-the-way
room, on a back street, the honest men of New York city may scan the
faces of its thieves, and hold silent communion with that interesting
part of the population which has agreed to defy the laws and to stand
at issue with society. Without disturbing the deep pool of penalogy, or
entering at all into the question, as to whether Actisanes was right,
or whether the police of New York do not overstep their authority in
putting on the walls this terrible bill of attainder against certain
citizens of the United States, whom their country's constitution has
endeavored to protect from "infamous punishments,"--the student of
moral science will certainly be thankful for the faces.

We do not remember ever having "opened" a place or picked a pocket. We
have made puns, however; and so, upon the Johnsonian _dictum_, the