“How did I ever come to do it? how did I do it?” he bitterly added to himself; but to that there came no answer. He did not know that famine and excitement had slightly unhinged his faculties; he knew only that in some amazing manner he had become a housebreaker and a thief in the face of his father’s commands, and got captured by the police in the very act. “Then jist you tak’ up your bundle and come awa’ wi’ me to the office,” said the policeman; and Johnny lifted the loaves and obeyed, the man closing the window, and taking down the name and address before leaving. While the pair were passing up St Mary’s Wynd towards the High Street, I chanced to be coming down, and stopped to learn the nature of the crime. Johnny’s face was quite unknown to me, and I could not believe that he or his relatives belonged to the West Port, a suspicion which was strengthened when Johnny became taciturn, and refused to reveal aught of his antecedents. I turned back with them, and went as far as the Central, trying in vain to draw the truth from the poor quivering boy. I should not have taken half the trouble with him but for the fact that he was evidently labouring under great excitement, and that more than once I saw his eyes become brimful of tears. Your true gutter child—the raggamuffin who steals as naturally as he draws his breath—is case-hardened against either tears or trembling. There is no mistaking him; and the first glance at Johnny half convinced me that in spite of his wretched clothing and haggard looks, he was not of that class. As he refused to speak, he was entered as “Peter M^cBain, West Port, aged twelve,” and locked up, charged with breaking into the shop of a baker whom I may name Brown, “and stealing therefrom four loaves of bread, of the value of 2s. 8d. or thereby.” My idea was that he was a runaway from some distant town, who had tramped the boots off his feet, and then been forced by sheer hunger to the robbery. I therefore had him tested with the offer of food. But Johnny was now too excited and overwhelmed with grief and shame at his position, and refused the food with unaffected loathing. Then the last prop was soon driven from my theory by a policeman on the West Port beat declaring, on being shown “Peter M^cBain,” that he believed he knew him well as one who had long been a pest to that district.