For the offence of possessing imitation banknotes Parsons was transported, but he managed to earn the good graces of the governor of the colony whither he was sent, and he was back again in England within two years, paying the expenses of his journey by an audacious robbery at the expense of the official who had sheltered him in his house.
And now having tried nearly every variety and form of crime, and being without funds, Parsons turned highwayman as a last desperate resource.
It was the most precarious of all professions, but there was ever the temptation of netting a large sum of money. His first essay resulted in a gain of about eighty pounds, and his second ten pounds less. The money was not much use to Parsons, and he would have abandoned the profession there and then had he not heard that a certain nobleman intended to carry a thousand pounds from London to a house a few miles to the north of Turnham Green.
Parsons resolved to waylay the coach and capture the money, but his plans were upset by his own arrest, and after five months in prison at Newgate he was executed on February 11th, 1750, the king rejecting a petition presented to him by the prisoner's powerful and influential relations.
[CHAPTER XIX]
ADAM WORTH
When the American Civil War was going none too well for the Northern States, President Lincoln, who was determined not to introduce conscription until he was absolutely compelled to, offered a special bounty of one thousand dollars (about £200) to every fit man who would volunteer to serve "for the duration of the war." We all know now that even the generous bounty failed to solve the recruiting problem, and that conscription had eventually to be resorted to, but for a time that thousand dollar offer elicited numerous responses, and amongst the men it brought into the army was a young clerk of the name of Adam Worth.
Worth was just under twenty, smooth-tongued, clever, self-willed, born to command, and, if physically small, his muscles were as strong as fine steel, while the dark, glittering eyes and the prominent nose were traces of his German-Jewish ancestry. He received his thousand dollars, donned the uniform of the Northern Army, and then deserted, to re-enlist later in another regiment and receive another bounty.
Such was the beginning of the greatest and most successful criminal career the world has ever known. In his school days Adam Worth had been cheated by another and a bigger boy offering him a new penny for two old ones. When the child was told of the loss he had sustained he resolved he would never be "done" again, and he certainly recovered those two pennies millions of times before he died.