nished from his
brow,--can that hollow-eyed, haggard wretch be the same man whose senses
opened on every joy, whose nerves mocked at every peril? But beside him,
with a grin of vile glee on his features, all muscle and brawn in the
form, all malice, at once spiteful and dull, in the heavy eye, sits his
fit comrade, the Gravestealer! At the first glance each had recognized
each, and the prophecy and the vision rushed back upon the daintier
convict. If he seek to escape from him, the Gravestealer claims him as
a prey; he threatens him with his eye as a slave; he kicks him with his
hoof as they sit, and laughs at the writhings of the pain. Carry on your
gaze from the ship, hear the cry from the masthead, see the land arise
from the waste,--a land without hope. At first, despite the rigour of
the Home Office, the education and intelligence of Varney have their
price,--the sole crime for which he is convicted is not of the
darkest. He escapes from that hideous comrade; he can teach as
a schoolmaster,--let his brain work, not his hands. But the most
irredeemable of convicts are ever those of nurture and birth and culture
better than the ruffian rest. You may enlighten the clod, but the meteor
still must feed on the marsh; and the pride and the vanity work where
the crime itself seems to lose its occasion. Ever avid, ever grasping,
he falls, step by step, in the foul sink, and the colony sees in Gabriel
Varney its most pestilent rogue. Arch-convict amidst convicts, doubly
lost amongst the damned, they banish him to the sternest of the penal
settlements; they send him forth with the vilest to break stones upon
the roads. Shrivelled and bowed and old prematurely, see that sharp face
peering forth amongst that gang, scarcely human, see him cringe to the
lash of the scornful overseer, see the pairs chained together, night
and day! Ho, ho! his comrade hath found him again,--the Artist and the
Gravestealer leashed together! Conceive that fancy so nurtured by habit,
those tastes, so womanized by indulgence,--the one suggesting the very
horrors that are not; the other revolting at all toil as a torture.

But intellect, not all gone, though hourly dying heavily down to the
level of the brute, yet schemes for delivery and escape. Let the plot
ripen, and the heart bound; break his chain, set him free, send him
forth to the wilderness. Hark, the whoop of the wild men! See those
things that ape our species dance and gibber round the famishi