About the year 1790, at the Assizes for the county of which the town of C----r is the county town, was tried and convicted a wretch guilty of one of the most horrible murders upon record. He was a young man, probably (for he knew not his own years) of about twenty-two years of age. One of those wandering and unsettled creatures, who seem to be driven from place to place, they know not why. Without home; without name; without companion; without sympathy; without sense. Hearthless, friendless, idealess, almost soulless! and so ignorant, as not even to seem to know whether he had ever heard of a Redeemer, or seen his written word. It was on a stormy Christmas eve, when he begged shelter in the hut of an old man, whose office it was to regulate the transit of conveyances upon the road of a great mining establishment in the neighbourhood. The old man had received him, and shared with him his humble cheer and his humble bed; for on that night the wind blew and the sleet drove, after a manner that would have made it a crime to have turned a stranger dog to the door. The next day the poor old creature was found dead in his hut--his brains beaten out with an old iron implement which he used--and his little furniture rifled, and in confusion. The wretch had murdered him for the supposed hoard of a few shillings. The snow, from which he afforded his murderer shelter, had drifted in at the door, which the miscreant, when he fled, had left open, and was frozen red with the blood of his victim. But it betrayed a footstep hard frozen in the snow, and blood--and the nails of the murderer's shoe were counted, even as his days were soon to be. He was taken a few days after with a handkerchief of the old man upon his neck. So blind is blood-guiltiness.