much above the average in expression,--lighted with clear, well-opened
eyes, intelligent and perceptive; most have an air of business
frankness well calculated to deceive. There is one capacious,
thought-freighted forehead. All are young.

No human observer will fail to be painfully struck with the number of
boys whose faces are here exposed. There are boys of every age, from
five to fifteen, and of every possible description, good, bad, and
indifferent. The stubborn and irreclaimable imp of evil nature peers
out sullenly and doggedly, or sparkles on you a pair of small
snake-eyes, fruitful of deceit and cunning. The better boy, easily
moved, that might become anything, mercurial and volatile, "most
ignorant of what he's most assured," reflects on his face the pleasure
of having his picture taken, and smiles good-humoredly, standing in
this worst of pillories, to be pelted along a lifetime with
unforgetting and unforgiving glances. With many of these boys, this is
a family matter. Here are five brothers, the youngest very young
indeed,--and the father not very old. One of the brothers,
bright-looking as boy can be, is a young Jack Sheppard, and has already
broken jail five times. Many are trained by old burglars to be put
through windows where men cannot go, and open doors. In a row of
second-class pickpockets, nearly all boys, there is observable on
almost every face some expression of concern, and one instinctively
thanks Heaven that the boys appear to be frightened. Yet, after all,
perhaps it is hardly worth while. The reform of boy thieves was first
agitated a long while since, and we have yet to hear of some
encouraging result. The earliest direct attempt we know of, with all
the old argument, _pro_ and _con_, is thus given in Sadi's "Gulistan."

Among a gang of thieves, who had been very hardly taken, "there