“When I met Bill Buckley,” said he, “in Thurston Wood, I was struggling with a terrible temptation to take my own life, and so put an end to my remorse for a wasted life and my fear of justice together. Since that strange meeting with Mr. Clayton on the Bexton highway I had lost all taste for the evil courses and companionships which had so long disgraced my life. The idea of going back to them filled me with a loathing that I can’t express, and I resolved to break with them for ever. The thought of Jesus dying for His enemies, of Mr. Clayton’s gentle kindness and forgiving love, with that ugly scar upon his cheek, of my mother’s weakness and the minister’s visit to her, upset me entirely, and I felt that I was too bad to live. I went about from one place to another like a man in a dream. I kept meeting with the fellows whose company I hated, and I could not get away from them without appearing, at any rate, to be the same as usual, though I believe they were led to suspect that I was not altogether to be depended on. Things were like that up to the evening of Kesterton Fair. I had been away to Gowthorp, to my Aunt Emma’s, to get out of the road of a lot of fellows that I knew would want me to go to the revels; but I felt so wretched that I could not stop anywhere, and so it was that I was on the Kesterton Road, when Bill Buckley, Dick Spink, and another chap, were on the look-out for Old Crabtree. I refused to join them, when Bill Buckley seized me like a vice, and with murder in his eyes declared that I should not leave them till they had ‘settled with Old Crabtree.’ Mother!” said Black Morris, “I had nothing to do with it, but the whole thing was done in a few minutes, and when Spink hit the old man a blow on the head which might have killed an ox, I managed to break away from Buckley, and ran to the poor old fellow’s help. He fixed his eyes on me, with a look such as I shall never forget, and said, ‘Black Morris! I know you!’ He fell senseless directly after, and I felt that I should be charged with highway robbery, and perhaps with murder. What happened after I hardly know. I roamed about from place to place, expecting every moment to be seized and punished for the crime. I said to myself it’s no use; you’ve sold yourself to the devil, and must submit to the bargain.” Here his voice faltered, and his hearers could not repress a murmur of sympathy. “I felt myself to be the most forlorn and hopeless wretch in the world. I found myself at last in Crib Corner, a dark, low, sheltered spot in Thurston Wood, where I used to hide my gun and other things. I heard a voice as plainly as I hear my own this minute, ‘It’s all up with you, Black Morris! You can’t repent, and you’re sure to be hanged. You had better shoot yourself like a man and balk them all.’ I believe I should have done it, but for God’s mercy. I went out with the gun in my hand, and walked rapidly up and down, saying, I will; I will! Then I heard the cracking of the brushwood,