IT may be naturally supposed that we detectives are not much given to sadness. It is, I suspect, a weakness connected with me, a tendency to meditate on the vanity of human wishes; and I should be free from the frailty, insomuch as there has been less vanity in my wishes to apprehend rogues than in the case of most other of the artistes of my order. Yet am I not altogether free from the weakness. We have a natural wish to see our friends happy around us, and this desire is the source of my little frailty; for when I find my ingenious friends off my beat, and away elsewhere, I immediately conclude they are being happy at the expense of others, and I am not there to sympathise; nor does it affect this tendency much that I am perfectly aware that my sympathy rather destroys their happiness. I had, about April 1854, lost sight for a time of the well-known Dan Gillies. He had had my sympathies more than once, and immediately took to melancholy; but somehow or another he recovered his gaiety,—a sure enough sign that he again stood in need of my condolence. “Why, Dan,” said I, as I faced him, and somewhat interrupted his passage, “what a fine pair of whiskers you’ve got since I saw you. The turnips must have been reared on the real Peruvian.” “What the d——l have you to do with my whiskers?” “One who has been the means of shaving your head,” replied I, “may surely make amends by rejoicing in the growth of your fine hair elsewhere.” “None of your gibes. Be off. I owe no man anything.” “No, Dan, but every man, you know, owes you, if you can make him pay. Don’t you know what’s up?” “No, and don’t care.” “There’s a grand ship-launch at Leith to-day.” “D——n your ship-launch!” said the Honeycomb; and pushing me aside, Dan strutted away under the indignation of the shame of my presence. I could not help looking after him, and recollecting the remark of Lord Chesterfield on the South-Sea Islander who sat at table in the company of lords. Looking at his back, you could perceive no difference between him Having some much more important business in hand that day, all recollection of Dan and his whiskers passed out of my mind. I remember I had to meet a French lackey who could point out to me a London brewer’s clerk committed to my care. The offender had run away from his employer, taking with him not only the flesh which had got so lusty upon the stout, but also a couple of thousand pounds which he ought to have deposited in a bank; nor was this even the entire amount of his depredations, for he had also contrived to abstract the brewer’s wife, described by my Frenchman as a “great succulent maman of forty years,” and not far from that number of stones avoirdupois. With such game in prospect, it was not likely I should trouble myself with Dan Gillies, nor did I care more for the Leith launch. The constables there could look to that, though I was not the less aware that if Dan got among the crowd there would be pockets rendered lighter, without more of a “purchase” than might be applied by a thief’s fingers. Notwithstanding of the brightness of my prospects in the morning—for I had even pictured to myself the English clerk with the “succulent maman” hanging on his arm, and together promenading Princes Street—my hopes died away as the day advanced. I had got, moreover, weary of the clatter of the lackey, and was, in short, “Dan, Dan,” said I, with really as much unfeigned surprise as humour, “what has become of your whiskers, man?” A fiery eye, and the terrible answer which sends a man to that place where one might suppose that eye had been lighted, so full of fury was it. “Why, it’s only a fair question,” said I, again keeping my temper. “I might even wish to know the man who could do so clean a thing.” “What have you to do with my barber?” “Why, now you are getting reasonable,” said I; “your question is easily answered; I might want him, say on a Sunday morning, to do to me what he has done to you.” Again dispatched to the place of four letters with an oath which must have been forged there by some writhing soul, I could stay him no longer, for making a rush past me, Dan Gillies was off in the direction of the Flesh-market Close, up which I saw him turn. His oaths still rung in my ear. I have often thought of the wonderful aptitude of the grown-up Raggediers at swearing; they begin early, if they do not lisp, in defiances of God, and you will hear the oaths ringing amidst the clink of their halfpennies as they play pitch-and-toss. Their little manhood is scarcely clothed in buckram, when they would look upon themselves as simpletons if they do not vindicate their independence by daring both man and Heaven. You may say they don’t understand the terms they use. Perhaps few swearers do; but in these urchins the oaths are the sparks of the steel of their souls, and there is not one of them unprepared to shew by their cruelty that their terrible words are true feelings. It may appear whimsical in me, but I have often thought that if this firmness of character—for it is really a mental constitution—were directed and trained by education and religion in the track of duty, it would develop itself as an energy fitted for great and good things. A man like me has no voice in the Privy Council; but literature, At the time Dan left me, I was not in this grand way of thinking. Nay, to be very plain, I was laughing in my sleeve; because, in the first place, a detective is not a Methodist preacher; and in the second place, because I have a right to my fun as well as others; and in the third place, because I came to the conclusion that Dan Gillies had some reason for shaving his whiskers which ought to interest me. In short, I had no doubt that Dan and his “wife” had been at the ship-launch. With the laugh, I suppose, still hanging about my lips as a comfortable solace after my ineffectual hunt after the brewer’s clerk and the jolly maman, I entered the Office, where the first information I got was, that a lady had been robbed of her purse at Leith, and that a young “I was thinking as much,” said I, with a revival of my laugh; “I know the man.” And so I might well say, for I had now got to the secret of the shaved whiskers. “What mean you?” said the lieutenant. “Why, just that if you want the man, I will bring him to you. I will give you the reason of my confidence at another time.” “To be sure we want him,” was the rather sharp reply of my superior. “Then I will fetch him,” said I. And so I went direct to Brown’s Close, where I knew the copartnership of Gillies and M‘Diarmid formerly carried on business, both in the domestic and trading way. Domestic! what a strange word as applied to these creatures—charm, as it is, to conjure up almost all the associations which are contained in the whole round of human happiness! Yes, I say domestic; happiness is a thing of accommodation. These beings will go forth in the morning in the spring of hope, and after threading dangers which are nothing less than wonderful, jinking the throw of the loop of the line which grazes their very shoulders, and turning and doubling in a thousand directions to escape justice, they meet at nightfall to enjoy the happiness of a home. The beefsteak, as it fries, I had been so quick in my movements that I went right in upon my man just as he had entered, no doubt after the cautious doublings consequent upon our prior interview. The salutation given me was a growl of the wrath which had been seething in the Pappin’s digestor of his heart. “What right have you to hound me in this way?” he cried, as he closed his fist and then ground his teeth. “Why, Dan,” said I, calmly, “I’m still curious about the whiskers.” “Whiskers again,” he roared. “Aye, just the whiskers,” said I. “I have told you I am curious about them, and I want to know why you parted with what you seemed so proud of?” “Gibe on; you’ll make nothing of me,” he cried again. “I defy you.” “Well, but I cannot give up the whiskers in that easy way,” said I, “because I have an impression that if the lady in Leith had not lost her purse, your whiskers would still have clothed your cheeks.” From which cheeks the colour fled in an instant. Even to the hardest of criminals the pinch of a fact is like the effect of a screw turned upon the heart. It is only we who can observe the changes of their expression. Dan knew, in short, that he was caught; and I have before remarked that the regular thieves can go through the business of a detection in a regular way. “Well,” he said, as he felt the closing noose, and with even a kind of grim smile, “I might as well have kept my hair.” “Never mind,” said I, “it will have time to grow in the jail. Come along. The cuffs?” “Oh no, I think you have no occasion. Them things are only for the irregulars, you know. But do you think you’ll mend Daniel Gillies by the jail?” “No,” said I, “I don’t expect it.” “Then why do you intend to send me there?” “Why,” replied I, in something like sympathy for one who I knew to be of those who are trained to vice before they have the choice of good or evil laid before them, “just because it is my trade.” And, strange as it may seem, I observed a tear start into his red eye. “Your trade,” said he, as he rubbed the cuff of his coat over his face, “your trade; and have you a better right to follow it than I have to pursue mine? You didn’t learn yours from your father and mother, did you?” “No, Dan, but I know you did.” “Yes, and the more’s the pity,” replied he, as he got even to an hysterical blubber. “I have had thoughts on the subject. Even when last in the Calton I could not sleep. Something inside told me I was wronged, but not by God—by man. I was trained by fiends who made money by what they taught me, and I have been pursued by fiends all my life. When was a good lesson ever given me, or a kindly word ever said to me, except by a preacher in the jail with a Bible in his hand? Suppose I had listened to him, and when I got out had taken that book into my hand, and had gone to the High Street and bawled out, ‘Put me to a trade, employ me, and give me wages.’ Who would have listened to me? A few pence from one, and the word ‘hypocrite’ from another, and then left to my old shifts, or starve. Take me up, but you’ll never mend me by punishment.” I always knew Dan to be a clever fellow, but I was not prepared for this burst. Yet I knew in my heart it was true. “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 |