death through his means, as I must do."

"I will hear no reasoning on the subject," replied the other; "go on
before me."

The man kept his pistols presented, and there they stood, looking
sternly into each other's faces, each determined not to yield, and each,
probably, on the brink of eternity.

At length the man dropped the muzzles of the weapons, and holding
them reversed, approached the stranger, saying, in a voice and with an
expression of feeling that smote the other to the heart,

"I will be conqueror still, sir! Instead of goin' with you, you will
come with me. There are my pistols. Only come to a house of misery and
sorrow and death, and you will know all."

"This is not treachery," thought the stranger. "There can be no
mistaking the anguish--the agony--of that voice; and those large tears
bear no testimony to the crime of murder or robbery."

"Take my pistols, sir," the other repeated, "only follow me."

"No," replied the stranger, "keep them: I fear you not--and what is
more, I do not now even suspect you. Here are thirty shillings in
silver--but you must allow me to' keep this note."

We need not describe anew the scene to which poor Trailcudgel introduced
him. It is enough to say, that since his last appearance in our pages he
had lost two more of his children, one by famine and the other by fever;
and that when the stranger entered his hovel--that libel upon a human
habitation--that disgrace to landlord inhumanity--he saw stretched out
in the stillness of death the emaciated bodies of not less than four
human beings--to wit, this wretched man's wife, their daughter, a sweet
girl nearly grown,--and two little ones. The husband and father looked
at them for a little, and the stranger saw a singular working or change,
taking place on his features. At length he clasped his hands, and first
smiled--then laughed outright, and exclaimed, "Thank God that they,"
pointing to the dead, "are saved from any more of this,"--but the
scene--the effort at composure--the sense of his guilt--the condition of
the survivors--exhaustion from want of food, all combined, overcame him,
and he fell senseless on the floor.

The stranger got a porringer of water, bathed his temples, opened his
teeth with an old knife, and having poured some of it down his throat,
dragged him--and it required all his strength to do so, although a
powerful man--over to the cabin-door, in order to get him within the
influence of the fresh a