We travelled in the most tempestuous weather. Snow fell incessantly, and was cast in drifts along the road; sometimes it looked as if we were bound for days, but we carried the mails, and with gigantic toil the driver pushed us through. The nearer we got to Edinburgh the more we learned of the notorious Daniel Risk, whom no one knew better than myself. The charge of losing his ship wilfully was, it appeared, among the oldest and least heinous of his crimes. Smuggling had engaged his talent since then, and he had murdered a cabin-boy under the most revolting circumstances. He had almost escaped the charge of scuttling the _Seven Sisters_, for it was not till he had been in the dock for the murder that evidence of that transaction came from the seaman Horn, who had been wrecked twice, it appeared, and far in other parts of the world between the time he was abandoned in the scuttled ship and returned to his native land, to tell how the ruffian had left two innocent men to perish. Even in these days of wild happenings the fame of Risk exceeded that of every malefactor that season, and when we got to Edinburgh the street singers were chanting doleful ballads about him. I would have given the wretch no thought, or very little, for my own affairs were heavy enough, had not the very day I landed in Edinburgh seen a broad-sheet published with “The Last Words and Warning” of Risk. The last words were in an extraordinarily devout spirit; the homily breathed what seemed a real repentance for a very black life. It would have moved me less if I could have learned then, as I did later, that the whole thing was the invention of some drunken lawyer's clerk in the Canongate, who had probably devised scores of such fictions for the entertainment of the world that likes to read of scaffold repentances and of wicked lives. The condition of the wretch touched me, and I made up my mind to see the condemned man who, by the accounts of the journals, was being visited daily by folks interested in his forlorn case. With some manoeuvring I got outside the bars of his cell. There was little change in him. The same wild aspect was there though he pretended a humility. The skellie eye still roved with little of the love of God or man in it; his iron-grey hair hung tawted about his temples. Only his face was changed and had the jail-white of the cells, for he had been nearly two months in confinement. When I entered he did not know me; indeed, he scarce looked the road I was on at first, but applied himself zealously to the study of a book wherein he pretended to be rapturously engrossed. The fact that the Bible (for so it was) happened to be upside down in his hands somewhat staggered my faith in the repentance of Daniel Risk, who, I remembered, had never numbered reading among his arts. I addressed him as Captain.