; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I
once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.

I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his
vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that
he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long
as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete
moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the
leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was
punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was
conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more
furious propensity to ill. It must have been this, I suppose, that
stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience with which I listened to
the civilities of my unhappy victim; I declare, at least, before God, no
man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a
provocation; and that I struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in
which a sick child may break a plaything. But I had voluntarily stripped
myself of all those balancing instincts by which even the worst of us
continues to walk with some degree of steadiness among temptations; and
in my case, to be tempted, however slightly, was to fall.

Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport of
glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow;
and it was not till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly,
in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill
of terror. A mist dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from
the scene of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of
evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the topmost
peg. I ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance doubly sure)
destroyed my papers; thence I set out through the lamplit streets, in
the same divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on my crime, light-headedly
devising others in the future, and yet still hastening and still
hearkening in my wake for the steps of the avenger. Hyde had a song upon
his lips as he compounded the draught, and as he drank it, pledged the
dead man. The pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, before
Henry Jekyll, with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had
fallen upon his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of
self-indulgence was rent from head to f