ral and vague term of "crime,"
everything depends upon the values of the individual performer; and
again and again do we find that a criminal has struck before
counting the cost to himself, or considering the unsleeping
detectives, hidden in his own faulty heart and brain, who will
sooner or later discover and denounce him.

The man of conscience, the man capable of remorse, the man who
murders at the prompting of a temper uncontrolled--such will swiftly
learn that however well the deed is done, a thousand baffling
distractions, bred of their own inherent or acquired weakness, must
arise to confound them. Remorse, for example, is always a first step
to discovery, if not to confession; and any lesser uneasiness
similarly tends to trouble of mind and consequent danger of body.
Those who hang, in truth deserve to do so; but they who strike,
like myself, for reasons that success cannot shake and from a
settled, farsighted resolution beyond the power of any emotion to
assail, should be safe enough. We rejoice in the sublime mental
gratification that follows success: it is our spiritual support, our
sustenance and our reward.

What can offer an experience so tremendous as murder? What has
science, philosophy, religion to give us comparable with the
mysteries, dangers and triumphs of great crime? All are childish
toys compared to it; and since, in any case, the next world will
surely stultify our knowledge, confound our accepted truths, and
reduce the wisdom of this earth to the prattle of childhood, I
turned from physics and from metaphysics to action--and happening to
taste blood early, tingled with the joy of it.

At fifteen years of age I killed a man, and found, in a murder
undertaken for very definite reasons, a thrill beyond expectation.
It was as though I had drunk at a wayside spring and found an
elixir. That incident is unknown; the death of my father's foreman,
Job Trevose, has not been understood till now. He lived at Paul, a
village upon the heights nigh Penzance, and his walk to his work
took him by the coast-guard track along lofty cliffs. Among the
fish-curing sheds one day, unseen, I chanced to hear Trevose speak
of my mother to another man and declare that she did evil and
dishonoured my father.

From that moment I doomed Trevose to death and, some weeks later,
after many failures to win the right conditions, caught him alone in
a sea fog as he returned homeward. There was not a soul on the
cliff path