ON BEING CHEATED.

|S credulity a virtue or a vice? This question admits of many answers. Some persons deny that there are any vices; and to satisfy other

inquiring minds one would have first to define credulity, and secondly to define vice. We all like credulity when it will suit us. In a young and pretty woman, into whose ear some flattering tale is whispered, credulity is, in the eyes of the whisperer, simplicity; and simplicity is the very crown and top of virtues with woman. Not one of us can bear to contemplate a "knowing woman." Not one of us would like a woman who would ponder, weigh, hesitate, and doubt. It is she who claims to have been the earliest disciple, and to have held hard all through doubt and fear and weakness to the living Miracle. It is woman who is pre-eminently blessed in having been thought worthy to have the singular merit and praise of being "last at the cross and earliest at the tomb." The mother was the first apostle of the Son; and so we typify Faith, drawing that abstraction as a woman holding a cross, and with pure eyes turned heavenwards, and raising a finger and pointing to the skies.

As woman had faith then, so she has it now. Women form the larger part of every Christian congregation; the exception, as in the churches where lawyers and students congregate, being merely sufficient to prove the rule. Nay, they have faith in the veriest charlatan of a preacher; and even Joe Smith can reckon them amongst the chief and most numerous converts of his woman-slaying Church. It is not wonderful that woman should bow down to the preacher who rescued her from patriarchal and Eastern slavery, from frequent tyranny and constant degradation, and placed her on a throne as the equal of man ; but it is much to be wondered at and regretted that she should also extend her faith to those who would degrade her and bind her again in the chains of polygamy.

Was it faith or credulity in woman which made her become an easy conquest to so wretched an impostor? Without the assistance of woman, Mormonism would at once die out. She is at the same time the chief disciple and the prize of those cunning and unconscientious men who carry forward that gigantic system of wrong. But, beyond this, woman has shown that her devotion constantly oversteps the bounds of judgment, and that her faith degenerates into credulity. When, so recently as the year 1838, the fanatic John Nicolls Thoms, of Canterbury, asserted that he was the Saviour, and brought on a riot, in which, after Lieutenant Bennett was shot dead by the fanatic, he himself was killed, a poor woman, Sarah Culver, was apprehended for being discovered washing the face of the dead fanatic, who had assured her that, should

he die, she was to put some water between his lips, and he would rise again in a month! Nor was this credulity of faith confined to women alone. The rioters, likening themselves to the disciples resisting the Roman soldiers, told the magistrates that they would have withstood thousands of armed men, since Thoms-who, by the way, had assumed the more aristocratic name of Courtenay-had told them that they could not be shot. After the death of the impostor large sums were offered by poor people for a lock of his hair, or a fragment of his blood-stained shirt, to preserve as relics. "The women,” adds the reporter, "with whom he was a prodigious favourite, are described as receiving these relics with every mark of enthusiastic devotion."

While woman's credulity generally takes the very amiable phase of faith and devotion, that of man is generally marked by a coarser and more selfish instinct. This is but natural, since in all matters, whether evil or good, which concern any system of ethics, we shall find man more coarse, strong, vivid, and active, than his partner, woman. The numerous victims of enthusiastic Jeremy Diddlers it would be impossible to describe. A fresh crop arises every morning; and the knaves, who seem to be exactly fitted for the dupes, manage to cull and harvest each successive crop, to pick it as readily as a gardener does his mushrooms, and to look with just as much certainty for more. All towns are infested with the genus which preys upon its fellow-men, the individuals of which are in slang language termed "rooks." No one can open a newspaper without seeing an instance in

which some very simple fellow is made a victim. The publicity which the press gives to these transactions, and the warnings of the police magistrates, are alike useless. The rook plies his trade the next morning, and the pigeon falls into his trap and gets plucked. It is generally managed in this way :-A young fellow, with simplicity painted on his face, we suppose, is walking London streets, when a gentlemanly man walks up to him and asks him some question. The first man is the pigeon, the second the rook. Mr. Pigeon gives the required answer, and Mr. Rook forces his conversation on him. He then proposes to have a glass of wine or of ale, or some refreshment, and Pigeon accedes. Whilst having it, in drops a second Mr. Rook, and he and the first begin to dispute, then to bet. Mr. Pigeon is appealed to, and is quietly "drawn in,” and in about half an hour finds that he has lost five, ten, or twenty pounds. It was but lately that a young lawyer lost fifty pounds in that way; and yet the scheme is as old as the hills. Ben Jonson describes such a scene; and hundreds of years before he lived, and in great cities which were in ruins before London was built, human folly and human greed were exhibited in the same way. Whatever we may have said against woman as to her credulity in matters of faith, we may generally assert that in such cases they would be wiser than men. In gambling, in being "picked up," in being cheated and deceived, woman shows more defensive aptitude than man. Her caution is larger, and, as a rule, she does not make so sudden a fool of herself as a man does. The cock pigeon

blunders into the trap: the hen pigeon has hers baited. A fine dress, a promise of fortune-telling, a little soft talk even from the lips of a roguish fool, will set woman off her guard; but then these are necessary; and the stories of victims of gipsies and fortune-tellers, of cut-purses and tally-men, amongst women, which we hear, read of, or meet with, will still prove that woman has not all at once surrendered, as man, in his blinder confidence in his own powers, constantly will do.

Nor is this gullibility or credulity exhibited only in the lower or the middle classes. At Baden-Baden and Homburg they have gaming-tables, and a few years ago they had them in London, to which young men are and were enticed simply for the purpose of being ruined and robbed of their patrimony. At Crockford's Club House, at the top of St. James's Street, now the Wellington Restaurant, just before the celebrated proprietor died, three young pigeons were plucked in one season whose united fortunes amounted to more than a million of pounds sterling! The place was notorious; there were, we may be sure, many people to warn them of the effects of gambling; the misery it brings with it had been vividly pictured in novel and in play for many years; and by a sure instinct, if a man will but trust it, any young fellow can divine very easily when a man means to cheat him. Marry," says the Lord Hamlet, "this is miching mallecho: it means mischief!" We can all see when a man means mischief. Yet these young fools, who were of high or good birth, with their eyes open, went into the trap just as

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