r to
terminate it, as might happen to suit his own inclination. Mr. Collins,
whose grey hairs and long services seemed to give him a sort of right to
be importunate, sometimes succeeded; though even in that case there was
nothing that could sit more uneasily upon Mr. Falkland than this
insinuation as if he wanted a guardian to take care of him, or as if he
were in, or in danger of falling into, a state in which he would be
incapable of deliberately controlling his own words and actions. At one
time he would suddenly yield to his humble, venerable friend, murmuring
grievously at the constraint that was put upon him, but without spirit
enough even to complain of it with energy. At another time, even though
complying, he would suddenly burst out in a paroxysm of resentment. Upon
these occasions there was something inconceivably, savagely terrible in
his anger, that gave to the person against whom it was directed the most
humiliating and insupportable sensations. Me he always treated, at these
times, with fierceness, and drove me from him with a vehemence lofty,
emphatical, and sustained, beyond any thing of which I should have
thought human nature to be capable. These sallies seemed always to
constitute a sort of crisis in his indisposition; and, whenever he was
induced to such a premature return, he would fall immediately after into
a state of the most melancholy inactivity, in which he usually continued
for two or three days. It was by an obstinate fatality that, whenever I
saw Mr. Falkland in these deplorable situations, and particularly when I
lighted upon him after having sought him among the rocks and precipices,
pale, emaciated, solitary, and haggard, the suggestion would continually
recur to me, in spite of inclination, in spite of persuasion, and in
spite of evidence, Surely this man is a murderer!

CHAPTER V.

It was in one of the lucid intervals, as I may term them, that occurred
during this period, that a peasant was brought before him, in his
character of a justice of peace, upon an accusation of having murdered
his fellow. As Mr. Falkland had by this time acquired the repute of a
melancholy valetudinarian, it is probable he would not have been called
upon to act in his official character upon the present occasion, had it
not been that two or three of the neighbouring justices were all of them
from home at once, so that he was the only one to be found in a circuit
of many miles. The reader however mus