“Ay, and it has often wrung my heart,” he replied, “when I have seen others who were born near me, though only in Blackfriars’ Wynd, respectable and happy, and I a criminal in misery by the chance of birth; but all this is of no use now. Then where’s Bess, poor wretch?”
“She’s in Leith jail.”
“Right,” cried he, as he blubbered again. “I sent her there. She was a playmate of mine, and I led her on in the path into which I was led. She might have been as good as the best of them.”
And the poor fellow, throwing himself on a chair, cried bitterly.
I have encountered more than one of these scenes. They have only pained me, and seldom been of any service to the victims themselves. Were a thousand such cases sent up to the Privy Council, I doubt if their obduracy in endowing ragged and industrial schools would be in the slightest degree modified.
I believe little more passed. I had my duty to perform, and Dan was not disobedient. That same evening he was sent to Leith. He was afterwards tried. He was identified by the lady and a boy who knew him, and sentenced to twelve months. Bess got off on the plea of not proven. I lost all trace of them, but have no hopes that either the one or the other was mended by the detection through the whiskers. The hair would grow again not more naturally than would spring up the old roots of evil planted by those who should have engrafted better shoots on the stock of nature.
The White Coffin.
IF the Conglomerates of our old town are troubled with many miseries, as the consequences of their privations and vices, it is certain the whole squalid theatre they play their strange parts in, is the scene of more incidents, often humorous, nay romantic—if there can be a romance of low life—than can be found in the quiet saloons of the higher grades in the new town. The observation indeed is almost so trite, that I need not mention that while in the one case you have nature overlaid with the art of concealment, the slave of decorum, in the other you have the old mother, free, fresh, and frisky—her true characters, rapid movements, quick thoughts, intertwined plots, the jerks of passion, the humorous and the serious, the comedy and the melodrama of the tale of life—an idiot’s one, if you please, even in the grave ranks of the highest.
In February 1837, as I was on my saunter with my faithful Mulholland among the haunts of the old town, we observed our old friends Andrew Ireland, John Templeton, and David Toppen, doubling the mouth of one of the closes leading to Paul’s Work. These industrious gentry are never idle; as they carry their tools along with them, they can work anywhere; and, like the authors, a species of vagabonds who live on their wits, and steal one from another, they need no stock in trade. It was clear to me that we were unobserved, and proceeding down another close, I expected to meet them probably about their scene of action. I may mention that I was somewhat quickened in my movements by some recollections that Ireland had cost me a deal of trouble—the more by token that he was called “the Climber,” as being the best hand at a scramble, when cats would shudder, in all the city, for which he had refused for some time to give me even the pledge of his body. We got down the close and round the corner, just in the nick of time to see the tail of Andrew’s coat disappearing from the top of a pretty high dyke. The two others followed the example of the Climber, and when they had disappeared, we placed ourselves at the side of the wall to receive them on their descent. The cackling of fowls soon told us the nature of their work, and the gluggering of choking craigs was a clear indication that the robbers were acting on the old rule that “the dead tell no tales.”
“Sure of the Climber this time,” I said to my assistant. “I will seize Andrew and Templeton, and lay you hold of Toppen.”