In a very short time after, the strange events of that day were terminated by the young man being placed in the debtor’s prison of the Calton.  Like other jail birds, he at first shunned his brethren in misfortune, fleeing to his room, and shrouding himself in solitude and partial darkness.  The change from a life of gaiety, if not dissipation, to the experiences of prison squalor, had come upon him without preparation, if indeed preparation for evil ever diminishes or much ameliorates the inevitable effects of the visitation.  Unfortunates exhibit wonderful diversities in their manifestations.  Dewhurst became dejected, broken in spirits, sad, and remorseful.  He scarcely stirred from the bed on which he had thrown himself when he entered; and his mind became a theatre where strange plays were acted, and strange personages performed strange parts, under the direction of stage managers over whom he had no control.  Though some unhappy predecessor in the same cell had scribbled on the wall,

  “A prison is a cannie place,
    Though viewed with reprobation,
  Where cheats and thieves, and scants o’ grace,
    Find time for cogitation,”

he did not find that he could properly cogitate or meditate, even if he had been, which he never was, a thinker.  All his thoughts were reduced to a continued wild succession of burning images,—­the mild face of his mother, so far away, as it smiled upon him when he ran about among the cane groves of the west; the negroes, with their “young massa” on their tongues, jabbering their affection; his father scowling upon him as undutiful; another, not so far away, in whose eyes—­beautiful to him—­love dwelt as his worshipper, looking all endearment, only the next moment to cast upon him the withering glance of her contempt, if not hatred; admirers, toadies, satellites, and sycophants, all there in groups and in succession, beslabbering him with praises, then exploding in peals of laughter.  Nor was another awanting in these saturnalia—­the form and face of her whose one word of sentence had been to him as a doom, and who fixed that doom in his soul by her red glance of reproof.  Seemingly very indifferent objects assumed in the new lights of his spirit gigantic and affraying features,—­the sea-gull, with its torn back, bleeding and quivering, and those diamond eyes so bright even in its looks of agony—­an object low indeed in the scale of nature, but here elevated by some overruling power into the very heart of man’s actions and destinies, as if to show out of what humble things the lightnings of retribution may come.  Nay, these diamond eyes haunted him; they were everywhere in these saturnalian reveries, following every recurring image as an inevitable concomitant which he had no power to drive away, entering into the orbits of the personages, gleaming out of the heads of negroes, that of his father, that of his mother, even that of his mistress, imparting to the looks and glances of the latter a brilliancy which enhanced beauty, while it sharpened them into poignancy.  But most of all were they in some way associated with the form of the unknown lady.  She never appeared to him as the being on whom his destiny was suspended; but, sooner or later, her own comparatively lustreless orbs changed into those diamonds, which could fulminate scorn not less than they could beam out supplication.