That cunning rascal’s curious history brings back to me, out of the mouldyⒶtextual note past of twenty-five years ago, a matter which is in some degree akinⒶtextual note to it. It was a story which was discussed a good deal at the time, because there was what seemed to be a pretty difficult moral question involved in it. A young Parisian gentleman fell heir to a fortune and ran swiftly through it, by help of the customary aids furnished by fast living. When he realized that all his fortune was gone except his watch, he promptly made up his mind to pawn the watch, spend the resulting proceeds upon a single orgy, and then commit suicide. He was in London at the time. The watch was a JürgensenⒶtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note, and worth six or eight hundred dollars. He took it to a pawnbroker; the pawnbroker examined it carefully outside, then opened itⒶtextual note and as carefully examined the works; finally he dipped a camel’s-hair brush into a liquid, touched the ball of the stemwinder with it, paused a moment for the effect—then he indicated by his manner that he was satisfied. He granted the young fellow a loan, at three months, of a hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars, and kept the watch.

The Frenchman dropped into a brown study on his way out of the shop, and before he had gone far he had made a radical change in his plans, and was resolved to postpone the orgy and try an experiment, and see what would come of it. The touching of the gold ball of the stemwinderⒶtextual note with the camel’s-hair brush had caught his attention; without doubt the liquid upon the brush was an acid, and perhaps that slight application of it was a pawnbroker’s common and only test of the genuineness of the gold of a heavy hunting-case watch. At any rate, one could find out whether this was the custom or not, and it might be profitable to examine into the matter in a practical way. That was the young man’s thought.

He was soon on his way to Switzerland. There he bought two or three sets of watch-works of unimpeachable excellence, and carried them to a competent and obscure constructorⒶtextual note of watches and got them enclosed in heavy cases of fine gold—apparently; [begin page 11] but in fact the cases were of base metal, gold-washed; still there was one detail which was of good gold, real gold, gold able to stand the test of an application of acid and come out of it with credit; that detail was the knob of the stemwinderⒶtextual note. He carried the watches back to London and distributed them among the pawnbrokers, and had no trouble; they touched the gold knobs with acid and handed him his money and his pawn tickets. He perceived that he had invented a way whereby he could make a reasonably good living, since he could calculate upon a clear profit of about eighty dollars on each watch. He sent to Switzerland for some more watches and unloaded them upon the pawnbrokers. He husbanded his profits carefully, and was presently able to order watches by the dozen. Naturally, he never went back to a pawnbroker to reclaim a watch. Pewter watches could not excite his passions.Ⓐtextual note

Even in London there is a limit to pawnbrokers—they are not inexhaustible as to numbers. In the course of time they would all be supplied—then what should he do? Would it be safe to try to furnish them a second supply? Or must he go elsewhere and seek fresh markets in the other European capitals? He thought he would prefer to remain in London, if he could think of a safe way to manage it. HeⒶtextual note contrived one. It was very simple. He tried the experiment and it succeeded. He hired a cheap assistant to pawn the watches to pawnbrokers who had previously been supplied, and fetch home the money and the pawn tickets.

NowⒶtextual note then, we arrive at the most curious and interesting part of this whole business—and that is this: at bottom that young Frenchman was very sensitive in the matter of morals; he could not bear the thought of cheating those pawnbrokers out of their money; they had done him no harm; they had offended him in no way, and he could not, and must not, have them onⒶtextual note his conscience. He was deeply troubled; along at first he could not sleep. Every day he added two or three hundred dollars to his accumulation of cash, and so the distress at his heart grew daily heavier and heavier.

At last a saving thought occurred to him, and his troubles vanished away. He went out at mid-afternoon with a hatful of pawn tickets in his pocket and started down Regent streetⒶtextual note. He drifted through the moving crowd of men and women, watching for the right face—the face which should indicate the presence of a treacherous and dishonest heart in itsⒶtextual note owner’s bosom, the face of a person who would rob his fellow man if he could, therefore the face of a person who ought to be made to suffer, and whom nothing but sorrow and loss could reform. Every time the Frenchman, eager to lift up his fallen fellow man and make him better and purer, saw that kind of a face, he dropped a pawn ticket on the pavement—apparently accidentally. There was always one unvaryingⒶtextual note result: that dishonest man glanced sharply around to see if the Frenchman had noticed his loss, but always saw—or thought he saw—that the Frenchman was not aware of the disaster that had happened to him; always, also, the dishonest man instead of flying to the Frenchman and restoring to him his lost property, as a clean and righteous person would have done, eagerly hid the ticket in his pocket and got away with all dispatchⒶtextual note. In the course of time, the Frenchman dropped some thousands of pawn tickets in front of that class of [begin page 12] persons, and as not one person of them all ever tried to restore a ticket to him he knew quite well that all of those shabby people had gone, each in his turn, and passed in his ill-gotten ticket and taken out a pewterⒶtextual note watch and paid about two hundred dollars for it—but without doubt had been in a considerable measure purified and reformed by that bitter experience.

You will easily perceive that there is a defect of morals here somewhere, because somebody cheated somebody, and somebody got robbed; but who was it that did the cheating? And who was it that got robbed? The Frenchman never claimed that he was pawning a gold watch; he could never have brought himself to make such a statement; he merely offered the watch without saying anything about its character, and asked for a loan. The pawnbroker estimated the watch’s value for himself and limited the loan to that valuation, therefore the Frenchman did not cheat the pawnbroker. Very well, did anybody cheat him? No. He got all his loan back with interest, from the dishonest finder of the pawn ticket, therefore he suffered in no way. The pawnbroker did not cheat the dishonest finder of the ticket, for the pawnbroker did not know it was a pewterⒶtextual note watch. The fact remains, first and last and all the time, that there was a thief present in this transaction somewhere, and it now seems perfectly plain that the dishonest finder of the ticket was the only improper person connected with the transaction anywhere. He saw the ticket dropped, he could have restored it to the dropper, but he preferred to keep it; therefore he stole it. In paying to the pawnbroker a hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars for what he knew to be another man’s watch, he perpetrated a glaring swindle, and since he was himself the person swindled there is no occasion for regrets, because he was also reformed and made clean, at the same time, and this was worth a hundred pewterⒶtextual note watches to him.Ⓐtextual note However, I will not try to go on any further with this. There are so many different kinds of morality mixed up in it that I find myself getting confused, I not being familiar with any but one kind.Ⓐtextual note