is such as mine.  I know not the hour, sir, when I may be knocked on the head.  I have no confidence in the people I go with; I have nothing to hope from the sympathies of society, or the protection of the laws; and I have now arrived at that time of life when my own experience is hourly repeating in my ears the words of scripture:  ‘The wages of sin is death.’  Mine has been a life of sin, Mr. Colleton, and I must look for its wages.  These thoughts have been troubling me much of late, and I feel them particularly heavy now.  But, don’t think, sir, that fear for myself makes up my suffering.  I fear for that poor girl, who has no protector, and may be doomed to the control of one who would make a hell on earth for all under his influence.  He has made a hell of it for me.”

“Who is he? whom do you mean?”

“You should know him well enough by this time, for he has sought your life often enough already—­who should I mean, if not Guy Rivers?”

“And how is she at the mercy of this wretch?”

The landlord continued as if he had not heard the inquiry: 

“Well, as I say, I know not how long I shall be able to take care of and provide for that poor girl, whose wish has prompted me this night to what I have undertaken.  She was my brother’s child, Mr. Colleton, and a noble creature she is.  If I live, sir, she will have to become the wife of Rivers; and, though I love her as my own—­as I have never loved my own—­yet she must abide the sacrifice from which, while I live, there is no escape.  But something tells me, sir, I have not long to live.  I have a notion which makes me gloomy, and which has troubled me ever since you have been in prison.  One dream comes to me every night—­whenever I sleep—­and I wake, all over perspiration, and with a terror I’m ashamed of.  In this dream I see my brother always, and always with the same expression.  He looks at me long and mournfully, and his finger is uplifted, as if in warning.  I hear no word from his lips, but they are in motion as if he spoke, and then he walks slowly away.  Thus, for several nights, has my mind been haunted, and I’m sure it is not for nothing.  It warns me that the time is not very far distant when I shall receive the wages of a life like mine—­the wages of sin—­the death, perhaps—­who knows?—­the death of the felon!”

“These are fearful fancies, indeed, Mr. Munro; and, whether we think on them or not, will have their influence over the strongest-minded of us all:  but the thoughts which they occasion to your mind, while they must be painful enough, may be the most useful, if they awaken regret of the past, and incite to amendment in the future.  Without regarding them as the presentiments of death, or of any fearful change, I look upon them only as the result of your own calm reflections upon the unprofitable nature of vice; its extreme unproductiveness in the end, however enticing in the beginning; and the painful privations