wledge! self-knowledge! From Heaven, indeed, descends the
precept, "KNOW THYSELF." That truth was told to us by the old heathen
oracle. But what old heathen oracle has told us how to know?

CHAPTER IV.

THE MAN-EATER HUMILIATED. HE ENCOUNTERS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE IN A
TRAVELLER, WHO, LIKE SHAKESPEARE'S JAQUES, IS "A MELANCHOLY FELLOW";
WHO ALSO, LIKE JAQUES, HATH "GREAT REASON TO BE BAD"; AND WHO, STILL
LIKE JAQUES, IS "FULL OF MATTER."

Jasper Losely rode slowly on through the clear frosty night; not back to
the country town which he had left on his hateful errand, nor into the
broad road to London. With a strange desire to avoid the haunts of men,
he selected--at each choice of way in the many paths branching right and
left, between waste and woodland--the lane that seemed the narrowest
and the dimmest. It was not remorse that gnawed him, neither was it mere
mercenary disappointment, nor even the pang of baffled vengeance--it
was the profound humiliation of diseased self-love--the conviction that,
with all his brute power, he had been powerless in the very time and
scene in which he had pictured to himself so complete a triumph. Even
the quiet with which he had escaped was a mortifying recollection.
Capture itself would have been preferable, if capture had been preceded
by brawl and strife--the exhibition of his hardihood and prowess.
Gloomily bending over his horse's neck, he cursed himself as fool and
coward. What would he have had!--a new crime on his soul? Perhaps he
would have answered, "Anything rather than this humiliating failure." He
did not rack his brains with conjecturing if Cutts had betrayed him,
or by what other mode assistance had been sent in such time of need to
Darrell. Nor did he feel that hunger for vengeance, whether on Darrell
or on his accomplice (should that accomplice have played the traitor),
which might have been expected from his characteristic ferocity. On
the contrary, the thought of violence and its excitements had in it
a sickness as of shame. Darrell at that hour might have ridden by him
scathless. Cutts might have jeered and said, "I blabbed your secret, and
sent the aid that foiled it"; and Losely would have continued to hang
his head, nor lifted the herculean hand that lay nerveless on the
horse's mane. Is it not commonly so in all reaction from excitements in
which self-love has been keenly galled? Does not vanity enter into the
lust of crime as into the desire