He was a most ingenious man, and invented a new and pretty system of ornamenting the edges of books. He was justly proud of this, and took great delight in it. I saw him pursuing his experiments time after time, with all the ardour of an inventor. We were just taking steps to patent it, when he was again carried captive by his old enemy. With some pounds of his own honest earnings in his pocket, with a watch and chain and plenty of good tailor-made clothes, with a thriving business that promised him independence, with a smile on his face and a ‘Good-afternoon, Mr. Holmes,’ he left my house and went to the suburbs, and broke into a mean little house, where it was impossible for him to secure portable goods to anything like the value of the money then in his own pocket. He was caught in the act, received a sentence of five years, and had his ticket-of-leave revoked. So again he writes to me from a convict prison, and pitiful his letters are. ‘I don’t know why I did it, but I was compelled to do it.’ He begs me to write to him, and implores me not to cast him off, but to let him live on with one hope and with the knowledge that he has one friend in the world. I do write to him, but what can I say to cheer him? Were he at liberty, what could I do to help him? My poor wits are powerless and my resources useless before his inscrutable madness or his demoniacal possession. But I shall never see him again at liberty--nay, nay, for in less than nine years he will have eaten his own heart. I sit writing with the books he bound all around me. I take one in my hand, and I see proofs not only of skill but of honest workmanship, and of a conscientious man. And then, far away from the work he has left behind, I can fancy him, a man of many talents and infinite resource, at the daily round, the maddening round, of his monotonous task. I see him in the silence and long-continued solitude of his cell; I watch the disappearance of the man and the revival of the animal. But never again shall I see his deft fingers at work; never again shall I hear his brisk step at my door; for heart-disease has already hold of him, and small wonder. A year or two of maddening thought, incessant reflection and choking confinement, and he will have passed into the presence-chamber of the great Judge.