Those of you who know something about blind children will know that they make the best thieves. As you can surely imagine, blind children have an amazing sense of smell and can sniff out things even behind locked doors—whether it’s fine fabrics, jewelry, or pistachio brittle—from fifty steps away. In addition, their fingers are so slender that they slip easily into keyholes, and their hearing is so sharp that they can distinguish the faintest clicks and clacks of even the most complicated lock mechanisms. Of course, the golden age of thievery is long gone; nowadays, there are very few child-thieves, blind or not. There was a time, though, when you could find one under every stone you turned. This is the story of the greatest thief who ever lived. His name, as you may have guessed, is Peter Nimble.* Like most infants, Peter came into the world without a name. One morning, a group of drunken but kind-hearted sailors saw him in a basket bobbing in the water next to their ship.

Sitting on the boy’s head was a large crow, which must have gouged out his eyes. Shocked, the sailors killed the bird and handed the child over to the authorities of a nearby port. Although a blind infant was of no use to the local rulers, a law required them to at least give him a name. With a silent raising of hands, they named him Peter Nimble, after the words of a half-forgotten lullaby. With only this name as his inheritance, they sent him out into the world to find his own way. At first, Peter drank the milk of a wounded mother cat he met when he crawled under the local tavern. The cat let the infant stay with her in exchange for cleaning her fur of lice and fleas—until a few months later, when one fateful day the tavern keeper discovered the cat family under his shop.