rce--all that is bad, because I am not permitted
to be better. My pride, my strong feelings and deeply absorbing
mood--these have no other field for exercise. The love of home, the high
ambition, which, had society done me common justice, and had not, in
enslaving itself, dishonored and defrauded me--would, under other
circumstances, have made me a patriot. My pride is even now to command
the admiration of men--I never sought their love. Their approbation
would have made me fearless and powerful in their defence and for their
rights--their injustice makes me their enemy. My passions, unprovoked
and unexaggerated by mortifying repulses, would have only been a warm
and stimulating influence, perpetually working in their service--but,
pressed upon and irritated as they have been they grew into so many wild
beasts, and preyed upon the cruel or the careless keepers, whose gentle
treatment and constant attention had tamed them into obedient servants.
Yet, would I could, even now, return to that condition in which there
might be hope. The true spectre of the criminal--such as I am--the
criminal chiefly from the crimes and injustice of society, not
forgetting the education of my boyhood, which grew out of the same
crimes, and whose most dreadful lesson is selfishness--is despair! The
black waters once past, the blacker hills rise between, and there is no
return to those regions of hope, which, once lost, are lost for ever.
This is the true punishment--the worst punishment which man inflicts
upon his fellow--the felony of public opinion. The curse of society is
no unfit illustration of that ban which its faith holds forth as the
penal doom of the future. There is no return!"

The dialogue, mixed up thus, throughout, with the utterance of opinions
on the part of the outlaw, many of which were true or founded in truth,
yet coupled with many false deductions--was devoted, for some little
while longer, to the discussion of their various necessities and plans
for the future. The night had considerably advanced in this way, when,
of a sudden, their ears were assailed with an eldritch screech, like
that of the owl, issuing from one of the several cells around them.

The quick sense of Rivers immediately discerned the voice of the idiot,
and without hesitation he proceeded to that division of the rock which
contained the two prisoners. To each of these apartments had been
assigned a sentinel, or watch, whose own place of abode--while co