THE RETIRED BURGLAR.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 10079, 14 March 1896, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE RETIRED BURGLAR.

HOW HE SAVED A MAN FROM SUICIDE. " When I got up to the top of the first flight of stairs of a house that I was in one

night," said the retired burglar, "and looked along the hall of the second storey, I saw coming from a partly opened door down

towards the front of the hall on the left a bright light. The stairs came up at the rear of the hall and on the right. The door of this room where the light was

opened on the side toward the front of the house, so that from where I stood I could see a little of the front of the room through the opening I listened, but 1 didn't hear anything, and I went along down toward the front. I thought somebody must have gone to bed and left the light up, but when I got up near the door I could see a man sitting in a big chair over on the other side of the room. There was a bureau standing against the front wall between the two windows, and the man was over in the corner beyond. He wasn't sitting back comfortably in the big chair, but forward in it, with hi* arms renting on his knees find his hands together in front of him with finger tips touching, thinking; thinking hard about something. He didn't see me, he wouldn't have seen mo if I'd stood right alongside of him, he was so busy thinking. " Pretty soon ho gets up and makes for the bureau. Ho laid his two hands on the handles of the top drawer, looking into the mirror, with a pretty solemn sort of a face it was, too. Then he begins to draw out tho top drawer slow, still looking all the

time into the mirror. I had a sort of instinct then what it was all about, but still I didn't fully realise it till he'd got the drawer about half way out, and had let go of the right hand handle and reached over with his right hand into the drawer, still looking square into tho mirror, and lifted out a pun and up with it to his head. "'Hey, there!' says I, 'you brassmounted, blue-moulded idiot I What's the matter with you?' and I makes a break for him, and, of course, he swings around, for it's a tremendous surprise to him, and in about a sixteenth pan of a second I've got his gun and we're standing there looking at each other ■ a young fellow he was, and not a bad-looking chap. " Well, do you know tint young chap had just simply made a failure of somo business undertaking and lost all his money, and he was sensitive and despondent over it, and that night he'd sat thore and

brooded over it till ho thought he couldn't stand it any longer, and he'd just upset himself.

" Well! I gave him a kind of talking to. I tried to make it clear to him thai he wasn't poor, but rich. ' Lost your money ?' says I. ' Why, great Caesar's gripsack ! You're got youth and health and strength, haven't you? What more do you want?' and he took it all in good part, and I loft him feeling better and grateful to me for dropping in."