ead guilty, he obeyed, and the sentence of
transportation for life gave him at first a feeling of reprieve; but
when his imagination began to picture, in the darkness of his cell,
all the true tortures of that penalty,--not so much, perhaps, to the
uneducated peasant-felon, inured to toil, and familiarized with
coarse companionship, as to one pampered like himself by all soft and
half-womanly indulgences,--the shaven hair, the convict's dress, the
rigorous privation, the drudging toil, the exile, seemed as grim as the
grave. In the dotage of faculties smitten into drivelling, he wrote to
the Home Office, offering to disclose secrets connected with crimes that
had hitherto escaped or baffled justice, on condition that his sentence
might be repealed, or mitigated into the gentler forms of ordinary
transportation. No answer was returned to him, but his letter provoked
research. Circumstances connected with his uncle's death, and with
various other dark passages in his life, sealed against him all hope of
a more merciful sentence; and when some acquaintances, whom his art
had made for him, and who, while grieving for his crime, saw in it
some excuses (ignorant of his feller deeds), sought to intercede in his
behalf, the reply of the Home Office was obvious: "He is a fortunate
man to have been tried and condemned for his least offence." Not one
indulgence that could distinguish him from the most execrable ruffian
condemned to the same sentence was conceded.

The idea of the gibbet lost all its horror. Here was a gibbet for every
hour. No hope,--no escape. Already that Future Doom which comprehends
the "Forever" opened upon him black and fathomless. The hour-glass was
broken up, the hand of the timepiece was arrested. The Beyond stretched
before him without limit, without goal,--on into Annihilation or into
Hell.

EPILOGUE TO PART THE SECOND.

Stand, O Man! upon the hill-top in the stillness of the evening hour,
and gaze, not with joyous, but with contented eyes, upon the beautiful
world around thee. See where the mists, soft and dim, rise over the
green meadows, through which the rivulet steals its way. See where,
broadest and stillest, the wave expands to the full smile of the setting
sun, and the willow that trembles on the breeze, and the oak that stands
firm in the storm, are reflected back, peaceful both, from the clear
glass of the tides. See where, begirt by the gold of the harvests, and
backed by the pomp of