stion. "Let us
halt and breakfast: I am tired."

"You forget!--we have no money till we make it," returned Birnie,
coldly.--"Come to the serrurier's he will trust us."

CHAPTER VIII.

"Gaunt Beggary and Scorn with many bell-hounds more."
THOMSON'S Castle of Indolence.

"The other was a fell, despiteful fiend."--Ibid.

"Your happiness behold! then straight a wand
He waved, an anti-magic power that hath
Truth from illusive falsehood to command."--Ibid.

"But what for us, the children of despair,
Brought to the brink of hell--what hope remains?
RESOLVE, RESOLVE!"--Ibid.

It may be observed that there are certain years in which in a civilised
country some particular crime comes into vogue. It flares its season,
and then burns out. Thus at one time we have Burking--at another,
Swingism--now, suicide is in vogue--now, poisoning tradespeople in
apple-dumplings--now, little boys stab each other with penknives--now,
common soldiers shoot at their sergeants. Almost every year there is one
crime peculiar to it; a sort of annual which overruns the country but
does not bloom again. Unquestionably the Press has a great deal to
do with these epidemics. Let a newspaper once give an account of some
out-of-the-way atrocity that has the charm of being novel, and certain
depraved minds fasten to it like leeches. They brood over and revolve
it--the idea grows up, a horrid phantasmalian monomania; and all of a
sudden, in a hundred different places, the one seed sown by the leaden
types springs up into foul flowering.

[An old Spanish writer, treating of the Inquisition, has some very
striking remarks on the kind of madness which, whenever some
terrible notoriety is given to a particular offence, leads persons
of distempered fancy to accuse themselves of it. He observes that
when the cruelties of the Inquisition against the imaginary crime of
sorcery were the most barbarous, this singular frenzy led numbers to
accuse themselves of sorcery. The publication and celebrity of the
crime begat the desire of the crime.]

But if the first reported aboriginal crime has been attended with
impunity, how much more does the imitative faculty cling to it.
Ill-judged mercy falls, not like dew, but like a great heap of manure,
on the rank deed.

Now it happened that at the time I write of, or rather a little before,
there had been detected and tried in Paris a most redou