and convulsions of a dying man. Though wounded to the heart, he may
speak. Then what may be chance to say? What looks of reproach may he
cast upon me? The musket may miss fire. If I wound him, the wound may be
less mortal than I contemplated. Then what may I not have to fear? His
dead body will be an incumbrance to me. It must be moved from the place
where it lies. It must be buried. How is all this to be done by me? By
one precipitate act, I have involved myself in a long train of loathsome
and heart-sickening consequences.

If it should be said, that no one but a person of an abandoned character
would fail, when the scene was actually before him, to feel an instant
repugnance to the proposition, yet it will perhaps be admitted, that
almost every reader, when he regards it as a supposition merely, says to
himself for a moment, "Would I? Could I?"

But, to bring the irrationality of man more completely to the test,
let us change the supposition. Let us imagine him to be gifted with the
powers of the fabled basilisk, "to monarchise, be feared, and kill with
looks." His present impulses, his passions, his modes of reasoning
and choosing shall continue; but his "will is neighboured to his act;"
whatever he has formed a conception of with preference, is immediately
realised; his thought is succeeded by the effect; and no traces are
left behind, by means of which a shadow of censure or suspicion can be
reflected on him.

Man is in truth a miracle. The human mind is a creature of celestial
origin, shut up and confined in a wall of flesh. We feel a kind of
proud impatience of the degradation to which we are condemned. We beat
ourselves to pieces against the wires of our cage, and long to escape,
to shoot through the elements, and be as free to change at any instant
the place where we dwell, as to change the subject to which our thoughts
are applied.

This, or something like this, seems to be the source of our most
portentous follies and absurdities. This is the original sin upon which
St. Austin and Calvin descanted. Certain Arabic writers seem to have had
this in their minds, when they tell us, that there is a black drop
of blood in the heart of every man, in which is contained the fomes
peccati, and add that, when Mahomet was in the fourth year of his age,
the angel Gabriel caught him up from among his playfellows, and taking
his heart from his bosom, squeezed out of it this first principle of
frailty, in consequence o