soul, indurated by crime, was as insusceptible to the soothing influence of such aspects, as the cold rocky cavern where he had harbored, was impenetrable to the noonday blaze.  The sun-glance through the barred lattice, suddenly stealing, like a friendly messenger, with a sweet and mellow smile upon his lips, was nailed as an angelic visiter, by the enthusiastic nature of the one, without guile in his own heart.  Rivers would have regarded such a visiter as an intruder; the smile in his eyes would have been a sneer, and he would have turned away from it in disgust.  The mind of the strong man is the medium through which the eyes see, and from which life takes all its color.  The heart is the prismatic conductor, through which the affections show; and that which is seared, or steeled, or ossified—­perverted utterly from its original make—­can exhibit no rainbows—­no arches of a sweet promise, linking the gloomy earth with the bright and the beautiful and the eternal heavens.

The mind of Guy Rivers had been one of the strongest make—­one of large and leading tendencies.  He could not have been one of the mere ciphers of society.  He must be something, or he must perish.  His spirit would have fed upon his heart otherwise, and, wanting a field and due employment, his frame must have worn away in the morbid repinings of its governing principles.  Unhappily, he had not been permitted a choice.  The education of his youth had given a fatal direction to his manhood; and we find him, accordingly, not satisfied with his pursuit, yet resolutely inflexible and undeviating in the pursuit of error.  Such are the contradictions of the strong mind, to which, wondering as we gaze, with unreasonable and unthinking astonishment, we daily see it subject.  Our philosophers are content with declaiming upon effects—­they will not permit themselves or others to trace them up to their causes.  To heal the wound, the physician may probe and find out its depth and extent; the same privilege is not often conceded to the physician of the mind or of the morals, else numberless diseases, now seemingly incurable, had been long since brought within the healing scope of philosophical analysis.  The popular cant would have us forbear even to look at the history of the criminal.  Hang the wretch, say they, but say nothing about him.  Why trace his progress?—­what good can come out of the knowledge of those influences and tendencies, which have made him a criminal?  Let them answer the question for themselves!

The outlaw beheld the departing cavalcade of the Colletons from the grated window.  He saw the last of all those in whose fortunes he might be supposed to have an interest.  He turned from the sight with a bitter pang at his heart, and, to his surprise, discovered that he was not alone in the solitude of his prison.  One ministering spirit sat beside him upon the long bench, the only article of furniture afforded to his dungeon.