There are some poor criminals that never have a chance; circumstances are against them from the first, as they protest, 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 raptuous misery after hearing, perhaps at a singsong, “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 broadmindedly to the till as a general institution, to be approached in unattended shops by stealthy groveling 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.

After the drag, Scuddy for long made a comfortable living, free from injurious overwork, in the several branches of lob-crawling and peter-claiming, with an occasional deviation into parlor-jumping. It is true that this last did sometimes involve unpleasant exertion when the window was high and the boy heavy to bunk up; and it was necessary, at times, to run. But Scuddy was out of work, and hunger drove him to anything, so long as it was light and not too risky. And it is marvelous to reflect how much may be picked up in the streets and at the side-doors of London and the suburbs without danger or vulgar violence. And so Scuddy’s life went on, with occasional misfortunes in the way of a moon, or another drag, or perhaps a sixer. And the mission-readers never despaired, because the real cause was always hunger or thirst, or betting, or a sudden temptation, or something quite exceptional — never anything like real, hardened, unblushing wickedness; and the man himself was always truly penitent. He made such touching references to his innocent childhood, and was so grateful for good advice or anything else you might give him.

One bold attempt Scuddy made to realize his desire for better things. He resolved to depart from his evil ways and become a nark — a copper’s nark — which is a police spy, or informer. The work was not hard, there was no imprisonment, and he would make amends for the past. But hardly had he begun his narking, when some of the Kate Street mob dropped on him in Brick Lane, and bashed him full sore. This would never do; so once more implacable circumstance drove him to his old courses. And there was this added discomfort: that no boy would parlor-jump nor dip the lob for him. Indeed, they bawled aloud, ‘Yah, Scuddy Lond the copper’s nark!’

So that the hand of all Flower and Dean Street was against him. Scuddy grew very sad.

These and other matters were heavy upon his heart on an evening when, with nothing in his pockets but a piece of coal that he carried for luck, he turned aimlessly up Baker’s Row. Things were very bad; it was as though the whole world knew him — and watched. Shop-keepers stood frowningly at their doors. People sat defiantly on piles of luggage at the railway stations, and there was never a peter to touch for. All the areas were empty, and there were no side-doors left unguarded, where, failing the more-desirable wedge, one might claim a pair or two of daisies put out for cleaning. All the hundred trifling things that commonly come freely to hand in a mile or two of streets were somehow swept out of the world’s economy, and Scuddy tramped into Baker’s Row in melting mood. Why were things so hard for some and so easy for others? It was not as though he were to blame — he, a man of feeling and sentiment. Why were others living comfortable lives unvexed of any dread of the police? And apart from that, why did other gonophs get lucky touches for half a century of quids at a time, while he! . . . But there, the world was one brutal oppression and he was its most pitiable victim; and he slunk along, dank with the pathos of things.

At a corner a group was standing about a woman, whose voice was uplifted to a man’s accompaniment on a stand-accordion. Scuddy listened. She sung, with a harsh tremble:

“— An’ sang a song of ‘ome, sweet ‘ome,

The song that reached my ‘art.

‘Ome, ‘ome, sweet, sweet ‘ome,

She sang the song of ‘ome, sweet ‘ome,

The song that reached my ‘art.”

Here, indeed, was something in tune with Scuddy’s fine feelings. He looked up. From the darkening sky the evening star winked through the smoke from ............