d to
the populace, at once a pleasant excitement and a wholesome and profound
example.

Among all the dangerous characters who, in such a state of society,
prowled and skulked in the metropolis at night, there was one man from
whom many as uncouth and fierce as he, shrunk with an involuntary dread.
Who he was, or whence he came, was a question often asked, but which
none could answer. His name was unknown, he had never been seen until
within about eight days or thereabouts, and was equally a stranger to
the old ruffians, upon whose haunts he ventured fearlessly, as to the
young. He could be no spy, for he never removed his slouched hat to look
about him, entered into conversation with no man, heeded nothing that
passed, listened to no discourse, regarded nobody that came or went.
But so surely as the dead of night set in, so surely this man was in the
midst of the loose concourse in the night-cellar where outcasts of every
grade resorted; and there he sat till morning.

He was not only a spectre at their licentious feasts; a something in the
midst of their revelry and riot that chilled and haunted them; but out
of doors he was the same. Directly it was dark, he was abroad--never in
company with any one, but always alone; never lingering or loitering,
but always walking swiftly; and looking (so they said who had seen him)
over his shoulder from time to time, and as he did so quickening his
pace. In the fields, the lanes, the roads, in all quarters of the
town--east, west, north, and south--that man was seen gliding on like a
shadow. He was always hurrying away. Those who encountered him, saw him
steal past, caught sight of the backward glance, and so lost him in the
darkness.

This constant restlessness, and flitting to and fro, gave rise to
strange stories. He was seen in such distant and remote places, at times
so nearly tallying with each other, that some doubted whether there were
not two of them, or more--some, whether he had not unearthly means of
travelling from spot to spot. The footpad hiding in a ditch had marked
him passing like a ghost along its brink; the vagrant had met him on the
dark high-road; the beggar had seen him pause upon the bridge to look
down at the water, and then sweep on again; they who dealt in bodies
with the surgeons could swear he slept in churchyards, and that they
had beheld him glide away among the tombs on their approach. And as they
told these stories to each other, one who had lo