But even upon these we have
improved, and nowadays, our whole social organisation is subservient to
detection. Cut your telegraph wires, substitute sail boats for steam,
and your old fair and easy forty-miles-a-day stage-coaches for the train
and the rail, disband your City police and detective organisation, and
make the transit of a letter between London and Dublin a matter of from
five days to nearly as many weeks, and compute how much easier it was
then than now for an adventurous highwayman, an absconding debtor, or a
pair of fugitive lovers, to make good their retreat. Slow, undoubtedly,
was the flight--they did not run, they walked away; but so was pursuit,
and altogether, without authentic lights and official helps--a matter of
post-chaises and perplexity, cross-roads and rumour, foundering in a
wild waste of conjecture, or swallowed in the quag of some country
inn-yard, where nothing was to be heard, and out of which there would be
no relay of posters to pull you until nine o'clock next morning.
As Toole debouched from Martin's-row, on his return, into the
comparative amplitude of the main street of Chapelizod, he glanced
curiously up to Sturk's bed-room windows.
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