"There is a man down in Whitechapel who is the best hand in London at that sort of thing. He is a downright artist. Several times when I have had particular jobs in hand, inquiries I could not trust anyone else to make, I have been to him, and when he has done with me and I have looked in the glass there was not the slightest resemblance to my own face in it. I suppose the man you want to represent is somewhere about your own height?"
"Yes, I should say that he is as nearly as may be the same. He is an older man than I am."
"Oh, that is nothing! He could make you look eighty if you wanted it. Here is the man's address; his usual fee is a guinea, but, as you want to be got up to resemble someone else, he might charge you double."
"The fee is nothing," Simcoe said. "Then again, I may want to get hold of a man who is a good hand at imitating handwriting."
"That is easy enough. Here is the address of a man who does little jobs for me sometimes, and is, I think, the best hand at it in England. You see, sometimes there is in a house where you intend to operate some confoundedly active and officious fellow--a butler or a footman--who might interrupt proceedings. His master is in London, and he receives a note from him ordering him to come up to town with a dressing case, portmanteau, guns, or something of that kind, as may be suitable to the case. I got a countess out of the way once by a messenger arriving on horseback with a line from her husband, saying that he had met with an accident in the hunting-field, and begging her to come to him. Of course I have always previously managed to get specimens of handwriting, and my man imitates them so well that they have never once failed in their action. I will give you a line to him, saying that you are a friend of mine. He knows me under the name of Sinclair. As a stranger you would hardly get him to act."
"Of course, he is thoroughly trustworthy?" Simcoe asked.
"I should not employ him if he were not," the other said. "He was a writing-master at one time, but took to drink, and went altogether to the bad. He is always more or less drunk now, and you had better go to him before ten o'clock in the morning. I don't say that he will be quite sober, but he will be less drunk than he will be later. As soon as he begins to write he pulls himself together. He puts a watchmaker's glass in his eye and closely examines the writing that he has to imitate, writes a few lines to accustom himself to it, and then writes what he is told to do as quickly and as easily as if it were his own handwriting. He hands it over, takes his fee, which is two guineas, and then goes out to a public-house, and I don't believe that the next day he has the slightest remembrance of what he has written."