same maddening stimulant. His nerves fail him at the critical moment, or the frenzy of despair dyes his hand with the ineffaceable stain of murder. In the one case a living death in the hulks separates him for ever from his fellow-men; in the other, the just retaliation of the law leaves his body quivering on the gallows, whilst his name becomes a byword and a curse in the mouths of generations yet unborn. This is the third and last stage of the downward journey; further we dare not follow the culprit; but few arrive at this awful ending without having gone regularly through all the previous gradations. Tom Blacke had only reached the second stage. He was now a professional thief and receiver of stolen goods. The lodgings in the Mews could now show curiosities and valuables that any one but a policeman would have been surprised to find in such a place. Gold watches, silks and shawls and trinkets, yards of brocade, ells of lace, and last, not least, a caldron always on the boil for the manufacture of that all-absorbing fluid which is called “white soup,” and sold by the ounce, surrounded the once virtuous Gingham in her once respectable home. She, too, was on the downward track, and she drank to stupefy the sense of guilt, which she could not altogether stifle, and from which she had not energy to extricate herself. Mr. Blacke, however, as he began again to be called, allowed no conscientious scruples to interfere with business. He dressed well now, always had plenty of money at command, might be seen at many places of public resort, and though aware that the police had their eye on him--to use a common expression, that they were only giving him “rope enough to hang himself,” and would undoubtedly “want” him ere long--he appeared resolved to live out his little hour with the usual blind recklessness and infatuation of his kind. Blacke was a plotting villain, and he had been for some time meditating a daring sweep that should eclipse all his previous doings, _and, if not thwarted_, realise a share of booty that would place him above want for the rest of his life. In order to discover and frustrate his plans, we must take the liberty of overhearing a conversation carried on between him and his confederate, in a small snug parlour off the bar of that very public-house in which Hairblower had been so shamefully hocussed and robbed on his former visit to the metropolis--an excursion he was not likely soon to forget.