“We shared our booty; mine I buried, for the present. Houseman had dealings with a gipsy hag, and through her aid removed his share, at once, to London. And now, mark what poor strugglers we are in the eternal web of destiny! Three days after that deed, a relation who neglected me in life, died, and left me wealth!--wealth at least to me!--Wealth, greater than that for which I had...! The news fell on me as a thunderbolt. Had I waited but three little days! Great God! when they told me,--I thought I heard the devils laugh out at the fool who had boasted wisdom! Tell me not now of our free will--we are but the things of a never-swerving, an everlasting Necessity!--pre-ordered to our doom--bound to a wheel that whirls us on till it touches the point at which we are crushed! Had I waited but three days, three little days!--Had but a dream been sent me, had but my heart cried within me,--‘Thou hast suffered long, tarry yet!’ [Note: Aram has hitherto been suffered to tell his own tale without comment or interruption. The chain of reasonings, the metaphysical labyrinth of defence and motive, which he wrought around his act, it was, in justice to him, necessary to give at length, in order to throw a clearer light on his character--and lighten, perhaps, in some measure the heinousness of his crime. No moral can be more impressive than that which teaches how man can entangle himself in his own sophisms--that moral is better, viewed aright, than volumes of homilies. But here I must pause for one moment, to bid the reader mark, that that event which confirmed Aram in the bewildering doctrines of his fatalism, ought rather to inculcate the Divine virtue--the foundation of all virtues, Heathen or Christian--that which Epictetus made clear, and Christ sacred--FORTITUDE. The reader will note, that the answer to the reasonings that probably convinced the mind of Aram, and blinded him to his crime, may be found in the change of feelings by which the crime was followed. I must apologize for this interruption--it seemed to me advisable in this place;--though, in general, the moment we begin to inculcate morality as a science, we ought to discard moralizing as a method.] No, it was for this, for the guilt and its penance, for the wasted life and the shameful death--with all my thirst for good, my dreams of glory--that I was born, that I was marked from my first sleep in the cradle!