We take up the end of the thread of our last chapter, and say, that as the potential developments of a man's heart cannot be exhausted except by death, we cannot pronounce, until that issue arrives, of God's purpose with him. We have known many men who, by a redundancy of the oil of self-satisfaction, have kept the lamp of jovial humour, or light recklessness, or flippant egotism, burning for a long period of years, and indulging all the while in the boast of an indomitable persistiveness. There are many such, but we suspect they are generally mere actors; and we are the more satisfied of the hollowness of their pretensions when we learn the account of them from those who have access to their privacy, and are apt to verify the saying that, as no man is a hero to his valet, so no jolly fellow, _pococurante_, or devil-darer is always such to his wife, children, servants, or friends. Even were it so, we would still say that the conditions have not been exhausted by some calamity which _may_ come, or by death, who _must_ come; and as there are worse evils than even death, the power of holding out is only an inverse mode of expressing the power of what is held out against. These remarks occur to us as we are now to follow the fortunes of the remaining three of the quaternity. Hare was still Hare up to the hour of his freedom, and that freedom, for which he had sacrificed the life of the man whom he had taught the trade of murder, was to be the test to try his obduracy, and prove the ruin of that persistency in evil which had mocked the ghosts of a score of murdered beings. He was let loose only to flee, and to flee under the only terror he felt--the uplifted hands of an avenging people. At a little past eight on the Thursday night, after the decision of the High Court of Justiciary, he was relieved from his cell in the Calton Hill Jail. It was a night of bitter frost, just such a one as Vejove would select for sending a Cain-marked murderer out upon the world. After being muffled up in an old camlet cloak, he walked, in company with the head turnkey, as far as the Post-office in Waterloo Bridge without meeting with the slightest molestation. At this point his companion called a coach, and conveyed him to Newington, where the two waited till the mail came up. The guard's edition of the story varies thus far, that he took up an unknown passenger in Nicolson Street, where he was ordered to blow the horn. But the difference is immaterial, and might easily arise from Hare's state of mind. Be this as it may, he got safely seated on the top of the coach without challenge and without suspicion. In the way-bill he figured as a Mr Black--not an inappropriate name--and the tall man who came to see him off, exclaimed, when the guard cried, "All's right," "Good-bye, Mr Black, and I wish you well home."[20] At Noble-house, the second stage on the Edinburgh road, twenty minutes were allowed for supper; and when the