HERE are some poor criminals that never have a chance: circumstances are against them from the first, as they explain, with tears, to sympathetic mission-readers. Circumstances had always been against Scuddy Lond, the gun. The word gun, it may be explained, is a friendly synonym for thief.
His first name was properly James, but that had been long forgotten. "Scuddy" meant nothing in particular, was derived from nothing, and was not, apparently, the invention of any distinct person. Still, it was commonly his only name, and most of his acquaintances had also nicknames of similarly vague origin. Scuddy was a man of fine feelings, capable of a most creditable hour of rapturous misery after hearing, perhaps at a sing-song, "Put Me in my Little Bed," or any other ditty that was rank enough in sentiment: wherefore the mission-readers never really despaired of him. He was a small, shabby man of twenty-six, but looking younger; with a runaway chin, a sharp yellow face, and tremulously sly eyes; with but faint traces of hair on his face, he had a great deal of it, straight and ragged and dirty, on his head.
Scuddy Lond's misfortunes began early. Temptation had prevailed against him when he was at school, but that was nothing. He became errand boy in a grocer's shop, and complications with the till brought him, a howling penitent, to the police court. Here, while his mother hid her head in the waiting-room, he set forth the villainy of older boys who had prompted him to sin, and got away with no worse than a lecture on the evils of bad company. So that a philanthropist found him a better situation at a distance, where the evil influence could no longer move him. Here he stayed a good while—longer than some who had been there before him, but who had to leave because of vanishing postal orders. Nevertheless, the postal orders still went, and in the end he confessed to another magistrate, and fervently promised to lead a better life if his false start were only forgiven. Betting, he protested, was this time the author of his fall; and as that pernicious institution was clearly to blame for the unhappy young man's ruin, the lamenting magistrate let him off with a simple month in consideration of his misfortune and the intercession of his employer, who had never heard of the grocer and his till.
After his month Scuddy went regularly into business as a lob-crawler: that is to say, he returned to his first love, the till: not narrowly to any individual till, but broad-mindedly to the till as a general institution, to be approached in unattended shops by stealthy grovelling on the belly. This he did until he perceived the greater security and comfort of waiting without while a small boy did the actual work within. From this, and with this, he ventured on peter-claiming: laying hands nonchalantly on unconsidered parcels and bags at railway stations, until a day when, bearing a fat portmanteau, he ran against its owner by the door of a refreshment bar. This time the responsibility lay with Drink. Strong Drink, he declared, with deep emotion, had been his ruin; he dated his downfall from the day when a false friend persuaded him to take a Social Glass; he would still have been an honest, upright, self-respecting young man but for the Cursed Drink. From that moment he would never touch it more. The case was met with three months with hard labor, and for all that Scuddy Lond had so clearly pointed out the culpability of Drink, he had to do the drag himself. But the mission-readers were comforted: for clearly there was hope for one whose eyes were so fully opened to the causes of his degradation.