Look to the windows of yonder houses--two handsome females. You may learn a salutary lesson by carefully contemplating their countenances. The one has led a life of guilt--the other one of innocence and virtue. Look at their smiles: what sadness there is in the one, and what satisfaction there seems to linger around the other! With the guilty, a smile springs only from the lips; with the good, it pleasantly indicates and answers emotions of the heart. See how vexed and restless the manner of the one, and how easy and calm that of the other--a noble contrast between abandonment and graceful dignity. The very bearing of the one indicates a knowledge of her degradation, whilst that of the other firmly yet modestly asserts her equality and her claim to respect. In their loneliness there, you may clearly read the thoughts of each mirrored in her face. What an expression of languor, regret, melancholy, remorse, agony, despair, you see in the one; what quiet repose, comfort, content, pleasure, happiness, joy, is depicted in the other! See in contrast, a spectre of deep, guilty sorrow, peering out from the wrinkles and furrows which tell of fearful tempests and revulsions within, and a calm placid vision beaming forth the life and buoyancy that speak only of the sweet serenity of the soul: dark, dreary, desolate night, filled with treacheries, conspiracies, murders, sprites, and hobgoblins, and bright, mellow sunshine, awakening every impulse and arousing every feeling to chaste delights! The terrors of guilt must indeed be fathomless, if it mixes a remorseful recollection with every smile, and tortures with mental anguish even the moments treasured for repose. Excitement cannot silence or drive thought from the brain, and retirement cannot prevent the soul from shrinking from its own pollution. “All nature is too weak a fence for sin,” observes an ancient poet, and “hell itself can find no fiercer torment than a guilty mind,” remarks another. Whatever, reflected Peter, may be the evil practices of the world, it cannot avoid the furies which they invoke, nor escape the terrors of their revenge.