For a twelvemonth after that night, I was, you will remember, not myself: in truth, a maniac, though a quiet and harmless one. My insanity was of the sullen and taciturn kind, so that I betrayed nothing; if indeed I had any remembrance of what had happened, which I believe I had not. The first dawn of recollection came through reading in an English newspaper, which the old curé brought to amuse me, an account of a man who was hanged for murder. I read it line by line--the trial--the verdict--the latter days of the criminal--who was a young lad like me--and the last day of all, when he was hanged. By degrees, first misty as a dream, then ghastly clear, impressed on my mind with a tenacity and minuteness all but miraculous, considering the long blank which followed,--returned the events of that night. I became conscious that I too had killed a man, that if any eye had seen the act, I should have been taken, tried, and hanged, for murder. Young as I was, and ignorant of English criminal law, I had sufficient common sense to arrive at the conclusion, that, as things stood, there was not a fragment of evidence against me individually, nor, indeed, any clear evidence to shew that the man was murdered at all. It was now a year ago--he must have long since been found and buried--probably, with little inquiry; they would conclude he had been killed accidentally through his own careless, drunken driving. But if I once confessed and delivered myself up to justice, I myself only knew, and no evidence could ever prove, that it was not a case of wilful murder. I should be hanged--hanged by the neck till I was dead--and my name--our name, Dallas's and mine, blasted for evermore. The weeks that elapsed after my first recovery of reason, were such, that when I hear preachers thunder about the literal “worm that dieth not, and fire that is never quenched,” I could almost smile. Sufficient are the torments of a spiritual hell. Sometimes, out of its depths, I felt as if Satan himself had entered my soul, to rouse me into atheistic rebellion. I, a boy not twenty yet, with all my future before me, to lose it through a moment's fury against a man who must have been depraved to the core, a man against whom I had no personal grudge--of whom I knew nothing but his name. Yet I must surrender my life for his--be tried, condemned--publicly disgraced--finally die the death of a dog. I had never been a coward--yet night after night I woke, bathed in a cold sweat of terror, feeling the rope round my neck, and seeing the forty thousand upturned faces--as in the newspaper account of the poor wretch who was hanged.