It has been said, that in the course of one man's life there occurs usually only one springtide on which he may direct his barque to fortune, and, so far as we have seen, this chance was not denied to the governors of Log's lodgings; but nature has not equally decreed that the voyagers shall see beyond that fortune, or to what it may lead. Nay, is there not something in the circumference of the objects of a day, if not an hour, if not a minute, which, like that which surrounds the scorpion, keeps all inside inviolate from the anathemas beyond? But then the circumference is ever changing, and ever enclosing new objects, till the last, with an opening in the side, looks out upon the dark or light theatre of retribution or salvation. We sometimes see this solitary springtide surmounted by the shattered barque of age, from which the waters of life are fast receding, and yet the voyager moves on. His fortune is a _hysteria_, through the ecstatic delirium of which he cannot see the gulf before his nose. These two men and two women whose history we record were on their springtide, and we are not to wonder that, beyond the circumference of rock and cloud, they were prevented from looking; not that there were not openings through which they could see ruin, but that the insanity of a fruitful wickedness made them revel blindly in the buoyancy of their progress, heedless of all rocks and gulfs of retribution. Poor moralising this, we suspect, as regards men whose pleasures, bought at such a price of a revolt against nature, could be termed only "painted pain." But even they could not be exempted from the laws of human nature. The circle behoved to contain its objects, and to change from day to day till the last came, with the lateral opening looking into perdition; perhaps any other mode ever devised by man of bringing sacrifices to mammon might not have been utterly exclusive of an attempt to get into a caste above. Bankrupts, thieves, adulterers, and even ordinary murderers, sometimes in our day try their hands at this, and make wonderful successes, for even these crimes which make men what they are, are not absolutely incompatible with a modern conventional status; but the crime of the men of our history involved in its very nature the impossibility of ever holding up the head in any other way than a swagger of desperation, or directing the eyes to an honest face, except as a look of dogged defiance. So, in addition to those evidences of change at Log's lodgings, we have only to mention the restlessness of the moneyed vagabonds driving them out to the streets to pull companions of their grade into drinking-houses, and treating them with the money which, however they might love it, burnt their hands that dispensed it. The delirium of intoxication amidst living objects that carried the mind out, was the refuge from, not the spectre of conscience, for conscience they had none, but that of justice, which no averting of the eyes could enable them to