I am the most unhappy man that ever occupied a prison cell. I say this advisedly, knowing that hundreds are at this moment bewailing their fate, which in many cases may seem harder than mine; but it is not, if they still retain the self-respect which I have lost. That’s what tortures me; my _prestige_ is gone; I am degraded in my own eyes; I despise myself as heartily as the most virtuous man in the world could. That I, to whom half the thieves in London have looked for guidance, should myself have laid a plot for myself and walked into it! It is too humiliating! To fall a victim to a too powerful combination of adverse circumstances is no disgrace; to be outwitted by the superior finesse of the police is hard, but endurable; but to fall into a snare which should not have misled a boy who had never stolen so much as a handkerchief in his life—this, this is shame! It was that diamond ring that did it. I really think some special ill-luck must have attached to the trinket, for it brought no good to its previous possessor. It was hardly in the regular way of business that it came into my hands—just as it has escaped from them in a most unbusiness-like fashion. That young man must have been in great straits before he united himself to me in the business of stealing his uncle’s cash-box, in order to obtain funds to pay his gambling debts. It was a very easy matter for me. He was to mix a few drops of an opiate I gave him with his relative’s brandy-and-water one evening, and leave the hall-door open; I had only to walk in and take up the booty he had collected and placed ready for me. It was a very fair collection of plate that awaited me as well as the coveted cash-box; but I am fond of jewellery, and the house was so beautifully asleep, that I could not resist creeping up to the master’s bedroom to see if there was not in it a trifle worth picking up. There was—the diamond ring, and a rather good set of studs. I took them, and slipped out of the room so quietly that I should not have disturbed their owner, even if my young friend had not, by way of making sure, doubled the prescribed dose of the opiate, and thereby plunged his uncle into, not sleep, but death. Poor young fellow! the knowledge that he had killed a relation who had always treated him with kindness, if also with severity, was too much for his mind, which doubtless was never strong. Those debts of honour were never paid; he never came to claim his share of that night’s spoil; and I have heard that the distant cousin who, failing him, inherited the old man’s property, grumbles greatly at having to pay for his being kept in a lunatic asylum. This is cowardice on my part. I have condemned myself, as the fitting punishment of my folly, to set down in black and white the way in which I entrapped myself, and I am postponing the task to maunder over an irrelevant incident.