By Will Irwin.

As Told to Will Irwin. “When these confessions appeared serially, friends and distant enquirers took it for granted that they were fiction; that I had stitched together, from the experiences of many grafters, the biography of a typical one. I hasten to assure the reader that this is a genuine confession; that I figure in it but as the transcriber of a life story told me I believe with every conscientious effort at truth during a month of pleasant association in New York. As a reporter, a little skilled in distinguishing the truth from the lie, I believed, when I wrote, in the sincerity of this story. Since then letters from his old companions of the road, who wished to be put into communication with him again, have confirmed detail after detail. I have disguised a name or a locality here and there ; otherwise I have set down only what he told me, trying through it all to give some flavor of the man and his vocabulary.”

New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1909. 182p.