_CONCERNING PEOPLE WHO KNOW THEY ARE GOING WRONG_.


Some five years ago a mere accident gave to the world one of the most
gruesome and remarkable pieces of literature that has ever perhaps been
seen. A convict named Fury confessed to having committed a murder of an
atrocious character. He was brought from prison, put on his trial at
Durham, and condemned to death. Every chance was given him to escape his
doom; but he persisted in providing the authorities with the most
minutely accurate chain of evidence against himself; and, in the end,
there was nothing for it but to cast him for death. Even when the police
blundered, he carefully set them right--and he could not have proved his
own guilt more clearly had he been the ablest prosecuting counsel in
Britain. He held in his hand a voluminous statement which, as it seems,
he wished to read before sentence of death was passed. The Court could
not permit the nation's time to be thus expended; so the convict handed
his manuscript to a reporter--and we thus have possibly the most
absolutely curious of all extant thieves' literature. Somewhere in the
recesses of Fury's wild heart there must have been good concealed; for
he confessed his worst crime in the interests of justice, and he went to
the scaffold with a serious and serene courage which almost made of him
a dignified person. But, on his own confession, he must have been all
his life long an unmitigated rascal--a predatory beast of the most
dangerous kind. From his youth upward he had lived as a professional
thief, and his pilferings were various and extensive. The glimpses of
sordid villainy which he frankly gives are so poignantly effective that
they put into the shade the most dreadful phases in the life of Villon.