but so soon after the event narrated, that time for
reflection had not then been allowed. The dreadful process of thinking
himself into an examination of his own deeds was going on; and remorse,
with its severe but salutary stings, was doing, without restraint, her
rigorous duties.

Though either actually congregated or congregating around him, and
within free and easy hearing of his voice, now stretched to its utmost,
the party were quite too busily employed in the discussion of the
events--too much immersed in the sudden stupor which followed, in nearly
all minds, their termination--to know or care much what were the hard
words which our young traveller bestowed upon the detected outlaw. They
had all of them (their immediate leaders excepted) been hurried on, as
is perfectly natural and not unfrequently the case, by the rapid
succession of incidents (which in their progress of excitement gave them
no time for reflection), from one act to another; without perceiving, in
a single pause, the several gradations by which they insensibly passed
on from crime to crime;--and it was only now, and in a survey of the
several foot-prints in their progress, that they were enabled to
perceive the vast and perilous leaps which they had taken. As in the
ascent of the elevation, step by step, we can judge imperfectly of its
height, until from the very summit we look down upon our place of
starting, so with the wretched outcasts of society of whom we speak.
Flushed with varying excitements, they had deputed the task of
reflection to another and a calmer time; and with the reins of sober
reason relaxed, whirled on by their passions, they lost all control over
their own impetuous progress, until brought up and checked, as we have
seen, by a catastrophe the most ruinous--the return of reason being the
signal for the rousing up of those lurking furies--terror, remorse, and
many and maddening regrets. From little to large events, we experience
or behold this every day. It is a history and all read it. It belongs to
human nature and to society: and until some process shall be discovered
by which men shall be compelled to think by rule and under regulation,
as in a penitentiary their bodies are required to work, we despair of
having much improvement in the general condition of human affairs. The
ignorant and uneducated man is quite too willing to depute to others
the task of thinking for him and furnishing his opinions. The great
mass are gr