l. His heart beat with a swifter stroke as he
remembered the excitement of their hurried flight from her parents, and
the wild joy of their adventurous lives, and then sank again to its
steady, hopeless throb as he recalled her penitence and misery after the
birth of the boy, his consenting to marry her, the ceremony, the respite
from self-reproach, the few happy months, the relapse into old bad
habits, the sobered mother becoming a devout and faithful member of a
Quaker church, his disgust at this, his quarrels with her and finally
his desertion of her. And then the whole subsequent series of adventures
and disasters passed before him--a moving panorama of dishonor and
crime! He paced the deck again; then he paused and leaned over the
gunwale, listening to the water lapping the sides of the vessel. Nothing
could have been more astonishing to him than the sudden activity of his
conscience. It had been so long since he had experienced remorse that he
believed himself incapable of it. But suddenly a fierce and unendurable
pang seized him. To a man who had been long accustomed to feeling
nothing in the contemplation of his deeds, but a dull consciousness of
unworthiness, this sharp and terrible attack of shame and guilt was
startling indeed. He could not understand it. The pain seemed
disproportionate to the sin; but he could not resist the repugnance and
horror with which it filled him! And this is an element in the moral
life with which bad men forget to deal! Because conscience ceases to
remonstrate and remorse to torment, they think the exemption permanent.
They do not know that at any moment, in some unforeseen emergency--this
abused faculty of the soul may spring into renewed life. This elemental
power, this primal endowment, can no more be permanently dissociated
from the soul than heat from fire! It may smoulder unobserved, but a
breath will fan it into flame! Without it, the soul would cease to be a
soul; its permanent eradication would be equivalent to annihilation! If
conscience can be eliminated, man has nothing to brag of over a
tadpole! We are no more safe from it than from memory! Who can be sure
that what he has forgotten has ceased to survive? The sweet perfume of a
violet may revive a bitter memory dormant for fifty years! At a word, a
look, a glance, conscience--abused, suppressed, despised,
inoperative--may rise in all her majesty and fill the heart with torment
and despair!

This corrupted judge, this