PICKING A POCKET.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 135, 5 November 1874, Page 3

PICKING A POCKET.

A respectable person was arrested the other day in Paris on the charge of picking a pocket under circumstances which must command the sympathy of the most rigid moralist. He was returning home from a social gathering when the natural convulsion to which Lord Dundreary used to be so subject overtook him, and he sneezed in the most uncompromising manner. This usually satisfactory operation is not, however, entirely so to a civilised person unless he can command the assistance of a pocket-hand-kerchief. The subject of this crisis, therefore, felt wildly in his pockets for the desired article, but his faithful companion had disappeared. Suddenly an emotion of joy, such as that with which a shipwrecked sailor espies a distant sail, lighted up his tearful eye. He saw depending from the pocket of a friend walking a few paces in advance of him a red silk handkerchief, large, soft, and lustrous. A few seconds more and he had buried his still quivering and wistful nose in those delicious folds, when the hand of a police-agent was laid on his shoulder, and the owner of the handkerchief turned round, revealing the countenance of a complete stranger. The pickpocket malgre lid was about to be led off to the station, when certain papers found on his person established his respectability so conclusively that he was suffered to go home, duly provided with a pocket-handker-chief obligingly lent him by a police officer.