rees even these tokens of life ceased--the last lamp was
entirely shut from our view--we were in utter darkness.

"We are near our journey's end now," whispered Jonson

At these words a thousand unwelcome reflections forced themselves
voluntarily on my mind: I was about to plunge into the most secret
retreat of men whose long habits of villany and desperate abandonment,
had hardened into a nature which had scarcely a sympathy with my own;
unarmed and defenceless, I was going to penetrate a concealment upon
which their lives perhaps depended; what could I anticipate from
their vengeance, but the sure hand and the deadly knife, which their
self-preservation would more than justify to such lawless reasoners. And
who was my companion? One, who literally gloried in the perfection of
his nefarious practices; and who, if he had stopped short of the worst
enormities, seemed neither to disown the principle upon which they were
committed, nor to balance for a moment between his interest and his
conscience.

Nor did he attempt to conceal from me the danger to which I was exposed;
much as his daring habits of life, and the good fortune which had
attended him, must have hardened his nerves, even he, seemed fully
sensible of the peril he incurred--a peril certainly considerably less
than that which attended my temerity. Bitterly did I repent, as these
reflections rapidly passed my mind, my negligence in not providing
myself with a single weapon in case of need: the worst pang of death, is
the falling without a struggle.

However, it was no moment for the indulgence of fear, it was rather
one of those eventful periods which so rarely occur in the monotony
of common life, when our minds are sounded to their utmost depths: and
energies of which we dreamt not, when at rest in their secret retreats,
arise like spirits at the summons of the wizard, and bring to the
invoking mind, an unlooked for and preternatural aid.

There was something too in the disposition of my guide, which gave me a
confidence in him, not warranted by the occupations of his life; an easy
and frank boldness, an ingenuous vanity of abilities, skilfully, though
dishonestly exerted, which had nothing of the meanness and mystery of an
ordinary villain, and which being equally prominent with the rascality
they adorned, prevented the attention from dwelling only upon the darker
shades of his character. Besides, I had so closely entwined his interest
with my own, that