"I have got a tolerable pair of trousers," he continued; "and since I am to appear before the public, I should like to be _respectable_. I have not a coat and waistcoat that I can appear in, and if I got the £5 I could buy them." But it is to be admitted that while he shewed no real signs of penitence in a Calvinistic sense,--so different these we suspect, from what are found in a votary of the confessional,--he evinced none of the dogged surliness of the hardened sinner, if his general mildness and continued politeness were not remarkable. Indeed, as we have seen, these characteristics were always, when he was not intoxicated, the prevailing features of his demeanour, from which many inferred that he purposely roused himself by large draughts of whisky to the fury which he found necessary to the perpetration of his onslaughts. This would seem to receive confirmation from the statement of a witness, who said that on these occasions he did not drink out of an ordinary measure, but used a strong-ale glass, which he would fill almost to the brim. Were this true, it would be no abatement from the malignity and sternness of the sober purpose which assuredly he must have entertained, while his external aspect was still as composed, if not as mild, as it was said to be. As a consequence of this placability, he gave way alternately to those solicitations with which he was daily pursued to utter a confession. He first made one and then another, but while these documents exhibit many discrepancies, they shew, from their curtness and desultoriness, that they were the result of a mere carelessness, only brought up to the point by pestering solicitations. Ten lines are devoted to the whole story of the murder of a human being, and if it had not been that circumstances came out on all sides, often from unknown sources, no more would have ever been known, at least as regards many of the victims, than simply that they perished. Even for these the gaping mouth of curiosity, and not less the hopeful heart of piety, was sufficiently thankful, while the hardened sceptics still refused to see the sign of the new birth.