erdant turf which I might have enjoyed in
the King's Park, or to the cool and solemn gloom of the portico which
surrounds the palace. To an indifferent person either side of the gutter
would have seemed much the same, the houses equally mean, the children
as ragged and dirty, the carmen as brutal--the whole forming the same
picture of low life in a deserted and impoverished quarter of a large
city. But to me the gutter or kennel was what the brook Kidron was to
Shimei: death was denounced against him should he cross it, doubtless
because it was known to his wisdom who pronounced the doom that, from
the time the crossing the stream was debarred, the devoted man's desire
to transgress the precept would become irresistible, and he would be
sure to draw down on his head the penalty which he had already justly
incurred by cursing the anointed of God. For my part, all Elysium
seemed opening on the other side of the kennel; and I envied the little
blackguards, who, stopping the current with their little dam-dykes of
mud, had a right to stand on either side of the nasty puddle which best
pleased them. I was so childish as even to make an occasional excursion
across, were it only for a few yards, and felt the triumph of a
schoolboy, who, trespassing in an orchard, hurries back again with a
fluttering sensation of joy and terror, betwixt the pleasure of having
executed his purpose and the fear of being taken or discovered.

I have sometimes asked myself what I should have done in case of actual
imprisonment, since I could not bear without impatience a restriction
which is comparatively a mere trifle; but I really could never answer
the question to my own satisfaction. I have all my life hated those
treacherous expedients called MEZZO-TERMINI, and it is possible with
this disposition I might have endured more patiently an absolute
privation of liberty than the more modified restrictions to which my
residence in the Sanctuary at this period subjected me. If, however, the
feelings I then experienced were to increase in intensity according
to the difference between a jail and my actual condition, I must
have hanged myself, or pined to death--there could have been no other
alternative.

Amongst many companions who forgot and neglected me, of course, when my
difficulties seemed to be inextricable, I had one true friend; and
that friend was a barrister, who knew the laws of his country well,
and tracing them up to the spirit of equity