I have had a good deal to do with the police in my time, as most working journalists have, and this reminds me of one or two adventures which, if I had preserved a chronological order in my narrative, should have been told earlier. Before I left Birmingham I became acquainted with an officer who afterwards became eminent in the service of Scotland Yard. The fashion in which we were introduced to each other was sufficiently dramatic. It was an hour after midnight in a heavy rain and the place was Pinfold Street, at the back of the premises of the _Birmingham Morning News_. A bedraggled woman ran shrieking uphill with cries of "help" and "murder," and behind her staggered a drunken ruffian brandishing a club which, when we came to examine it later, proved to have been sawn from the top of an old-fashioned mahogany bedstead. It was simply rounded at one end and square and heavy at the other, and it would infallibly have done the business of any person with whose head it had come in contact. I was encumbered with a heavy ulster which was buttoned down almost to my feet and I should certainly have been too late to prevent mischief, but just as the pursuer came within striking distance an agile figure darted round the corner and the murderous-minded drunkard dropped like an ox in the shambles at a single blow. The newcomer was a plain-clothes policeman and he had used a pair of handcuffs as a knuckle-duster and had taken the ruffian clean on the point of the chin. I accompanied him and his captor to the Moor Street police station and got a paragraph out of the incident before the paper went to bed.
I saw no more of my plain-clothes man for a month or two and then an odd circumstance threw us together again. My father, who was still carrying on business in West Bromwich, was a letterpress printer only, but he received an occasional order for copperplate and lithographic work which he handed over either to a Mr Storey in Livery Street, or to the firm of W. & B. Hunt in New Street. I had been over to call on him one evening and he had asked me to attend to some slight commission with either of these firms. I called first on the Livery Street man, whose establishment was just outside Snow Hill station, and found him looking at a queer copperplate impression which lay on the counter before him.