eman
would not consent to let any grass grow under his heels till he had
made assurance doubly sure, and had seen Herbert Fitzgerald firmly
seated on his throne. All that the women in Spinny Lane had told him
was quite true. The register was found in the archives of the parish
of Putney, and Mr. Prendergast was able to prove that Mr. Matthew
Mollett, now of Spinny Lane, and the Mr. Matthew Mollett then
designated as of Newmarket in Cambridgeshire, were one and the same
person; therefore Mr. Mollett's marriage with Miss Wainwright was
no marriage, and therefore, also, the marriage between Sir Thomas
Fitzgerald and that lady was a true marriage; all which things will
now be plain to any novel-reading capacity, mean as such capacity may
be in respect to legal law.

And I have only further to tell in respect to this part of my story,
that the Molletts, both father and son, escaped all punishment
for the frauds and villanies related in these pages--except such
punishment as these frauds and villanies, acting by their own innate
destructive forces and poisons, brought down upon their unfortunate
heads. For so allowing them to escape I shall be held by many to
have been deficient in sound teaching. "What!" men will say, "not
punish your evil principle! Allow the prevailing evil genius of your
book to escape scot free, without administering any of that condign
punishment which it would have been so easy for you to allot to them!
Had you not treadmills to your hand, and all manner of new prison
disciplines? Should not Matthew have repented in the sackcloth of
solitary confinement, and Aby have munched and crunched between his
teeth the bitter ashes of prison bread and water? Nay, for such
offences as those did you wot of no penal settlements? Were not
Portland and Spike Islands gaping for them? Had you no memory of
Dartmoor and the Bermudas?"

Gentle readers, no; not in this instance shall Spike Island or the
Bermudas be asked to give us their assistance. There is a sackcloth
harsher to the skin than that of the penal settlement, and ashes more
bitter in the crunching than convict rations. It would be sad indeed
if we thought that those rascals who escape the law escape also the
just reward of their rascality. May it not rather be believed that
the whole life of the professional rascal is one long wretched
punishment, to which, if he could but know it, the rations and
comparative innocence of Bermuda would be so preferable? I