Several years ago, a man of the name of Samuel Needy, a poor artisan, was living in London. He had with him a wife, and a child by this wife. This artisan was skillful, quick, intelligent, very ill-treated by education, very well-treated by nature--able to think, but not to read. One winter his work failed him--there was neither fire nor food in his garret; the man, the woman, and the child were cold and hungry; he committed a theft; it is unnecessary to state what he stole, or whence he stole it. Suffice it to know, that the consequences of this theft were three days' food and fire to the wife and child, and five years of imprisonment to the man. Sam Needy, lately an honest man, now and henceforth a thief, was dignified and grave in appearance; his high forehead was already wrinkled, though he was still young; some gray lines lurked among the black and bushy tufts of his hair; his eye was soft, and buried deep beneath his lofty and well-turned eye-brow; his nostrils were open, his chin advancing, his lip scornful; it was a fine head--let us see what society made of it. He was a man of few words--more frequent gestures--somewhat imperious in his whole manner, and one to make himself obeyed; of a melancholy air--rather serious than suffering; for all that he had suffered enough. In the place where he was confined there was a director of the work-rooms--a kind of functionary peculiar to prisons, who combined in himself the offices of turnkey and tradesman, who would at the same time issue an order to the workman and threaten the prisoner--put tools in his hand and irons on his feet. This man was a variety of his own species--a man peremptory, tyrannical, governed by his fancies, holding tight the reins of his authority, and yet, on occasion, a boon companion, jovial and condescending to a joke--rather hard than firm--reasoning with no one--not even himself--a good father, and doubtless a good husband--(a duty, by the way, and not a virtue;) in short, evil but not bad. The principal, the diagonal line of this man's character was obstinacy; he was proud of it, and therein compared himself to Napoleon, when he had once fixed what he called _his will_ upon an absurdity, he went to its furthest length, holding his head high, and despising all obstacles. Such violence of purpose without reason, is only folly tied to the tail of brute force, and serving to lengthen it. For the most part, whenever a catastrophe, whether public or private, happens amongst men, if we look beneath the rubbish with which it strews the earth, to find in what manner the fallen fabric had been propped, we shall, with rare exceptions, discover it to have been blindly put together by a weak and obstinate man, trusting and admiring himself implicitly. Many of the smaller of these strange fatalities pass in the world for providences. Such was he who was the director of the work-rooms in the House of Correction where poor Sam Needy was sent to undergo his sentence. Such was the