consequent on the satiating of another lust--to rob his victim of a few trinkets! Let loose the wildest imagination into the realms of wildest wickedness, and yet they dared not, as they feared God, to credit for a moment the union of such appalling and such paltry guilt, _in that man_ who now trembled not before them, but who seemed cut off from all the sensibilities of this life by the scythe of Misery that had shorn him down! But why try to recount, however feebly, the line of defence taken by the speaker, who on that day seemed all but inspired? The sea may overturn rocks, or fire consume them till they split in pieces; but a crisis there sometimes is in man's destiny, which all the powers ever lodged in the lips of man, were they touched with a coal from heaven, cannot avert, and when even he who strives to save, feels and knows that he is striving all in vain--ay, vain as a worm--to arrest the tread of Fate about to trample down its victim into the dust. All hoped--many almost believed--that the prisoner would be acquitted--that a verdict of "Not Proven," at least, if not of "Not Guilty," would be returned; but _they_ had not been sworn to do justice before man and before God--and, if need were, to seal up even the fountains of mercy in their hearts--flowing, and easily set a-flowing, by such a spectacle as that bar presented--a man already seeming to belong unto the dead! In about a quarter of an hour the jury returned to the box--and the verdict, having been sealed with black wax, was handed up to the Judge, who read, "We unanimously find the prisoner Guilty." He then stood up to receive sentence of death. Not a dry eye was in the court during the Judge's solemn and affecting address to the criminal--except those of the Shadow on whom had been pronounced the doom. "Your body will be hung in chains on the moor--on a gibbet erected on the spot where you murdered the victim of your unhallowed lust, and there will your bones bleach in the sun, and rattle in the wind, after the insects and the birds of the air have devoured your flesh; and in all future times, the spot on which, God-forsaking and God-forsaken, you perpetrated that double crime, at which all humanity shudders, will be looked on from afar by the traveller passing through that lonesome wild with a sacred horror!" Here the voice of the Judge faltered, and he covered his face with his hands; but the prisoner stood unmoved in figure, and in face untroubled and when all was closed, was removed from the bar, the same ghostlike and unearthly phantom, seemingly unconscious of what had passed, or even of his own existence.