He turned quickly back, and looking me in the face, without the slightest anger, said, “An execrable villain if you like—­not a remorseless one!  Her death alone sits near, and troubles my, to all else, hardened conscience.  And let me tell you, reverend sir,” he continued, resuming his former bitterness as he addressed the chaplain—­“let me tell you that it was not the solemn words of the judge the other day, but her pale, reproachful image, standing suddenly beside me in the dock, just as she looked when I passed my last deception on her, that caused the tremor and affright, complacently attributed by that grave functionary to his own sepulchral eloquence.  After all, her death cannot be exclusively laid to my charge.  Those who tried her would not believe her story, and yet it was true as death.  Had they not been so confident in their own unerring wisdom, they might have doomed her to some punishment short of the scaffold, and could now have retrieved their error.  But I am weary, and would, I repeat, be alone.  Farewell!” He threw himself on the rude pallet, and we silently withdrew.

A paper embodying Justin Arnold’s declaration was forwarded to the secretary of state, and duly acknowledged, accompanied by an official expression of mild regret that it had not been made in time to save the life of Jane Eccles.  No further notice was taken of the matter, and the record of the young woman’s judicial sacrifice still doubtless encumbers the archives of the Home Office, forming, with numerous others of like character, the dark, sanguine background upon which the achievements of the great and good men who have so successfully purged the old Draco code that now a faint vestige only of the old barbarism remains, stands out in bright relief and changeless lustre.

“EVERY MAN HIS OWN LAWYER.”

A smarter trader, a keener appreciator of the tendencies to a rise or fall in colonial produce—­sugars more especially—­than John Linden, of Mincing Lane, it would have been difficult to point out in the wide city of London.  He was not so immensely rich as many others engaged in the same merchant-traffic as himself; nothing at all like it, indeed, for I doubt that he could at any time have been esteemed worth more than from eighty to ninety thousand pounds; but his transactions, although limited in extent when compared with those of the mammoth colonial houses, almost always returned more or less of profit; the result of his remarkable keenness and sagacity in scenting hurricanes, black insurrections, and emancipation bills, whilst yet inappreciable, or deemed afar off, by less sensitive organizations.  At least to this wonderful prescience of future sugar-value did Mr. Linden himself attribute his rise in the world, and gradual increase in rotundity, riches, and respectability.  This constant success engendered, as it is too apt to do, inordinate egotism, conceit, self-esteem, vanity.  There was scarcely a social, governmental, or economical