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Authors:

I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime. In my case, this belief about my son Laurie is shared - not without reason - by Mrs. John R. Simpkins, of upper New York State, whose opinions on Laurie are even more forceful than those held by myself and, to a lesser extent, by my husband, who has recently been doing research into eighteenth-century crime, and points out that at that time all twelve-year-old boys were criminals - or, as he has it, cross-coves - and many of them, as a matter of fact, were named Simpkins. 'The gooseberry trick,' he says reassuringly, 'glomming the grapevine.

Shirley Jackson