It is natural, and in one sense is all right enough.  I want to catch a thief and put the extinguisher on an incendiary as much as my neighbors do; but I have two sides to my consciousness as I have two sides to my heart, one carrying dark, impure blood, and the other the bright stream which has been purified and vivified by the great source of life and death,—­the oxygen of the air which gives all things their vital heat, and burns all things at last to ashes.

One side of me loves and hates; the other side of me judges, say rather pleads and suspends judgment.  I think, if I were left to myself, I should hang a rogue and then write his apology and subscribe to a neat monument, commemorating, not his virtues, but his misfortunes.  I should, perhaps, adorn the marble with emblems, as is the custom with regard to the more regular and normally constituted members of society.  It would not be proper to put the image of a lamb upon the stone which marked the resting-place of him of the private cemetery.  But I would not hesitate to place the effigy of a wolf or a hyena upon the monument.  I do not judge these animals, I only kill them or shut them up.  I presume they stand just as well with their Maker as lambs and kids, and the existence of such beings is a perpetual plea for God Almighty’s poor, yelling, scalping Indians, his weasand-stopping Thugs, his despised felons, his murdering miscreants, and all the unfortunates whom we, picked individuals of a picked class of a picked race, scrubbed, combed, and catechized from our cradles upward, undertake to find accommodations for in another state of being where it is to be hoped they will have a better chance than they had in this.

The Master paused, and took off his great round spectacles.  I could not help thinking that he looked benevolent enough to pardon Judas Iscariot just at that moment, though his features can knot themselves up pretty, formidably on occasion.

—­You are somewhat of a phrenologist, I judge, by the way you talk of instinctive and inherited tendencies—­I said.

—­They tell me I ought to be,—­he answered, parrying my question, as I thought.—–­I have had a famous chart made out of my cerebral organs, according to which I ought to have been—­something more than a poor Magister Artaum.

—­I thought a shade of regret deepened the lines on his broad, antique-looking forehead, and I began talking about all the sights I had seen in the way of monstrosities, of which I had a considerable list, as you will see when I tell you my weakness in that direction.  This, you understand, Beloved, is private and confidential.