gh.

If a destiny like this man's can ever have a crisis, the hour of his
hope is that; but downward still, into a lower gulf, has been
continually his bad career; there is (unless a miracle intervene) no
stopping in the slope on which he glides, albeit there may be
precipices. He that rushes in his sledge down the artificial ice-hills
of St. Petersburgh, skims along not more swiftly than Jennings, from the
altitude of infant innocence, had sheered into the depths of full-grown
depravity; but even he can fall, and reach, with startling suddenness, a
lower deep.

As if that Russian mountain, hewn asunder midway, were fitted flush to
a Norwegian cliff, beetling precipitately over the whirlpool; then tilt
the sledge with its furred inmate over the slope, let it skim with
quicker impetus the smoking ice, let it touch that beetling edge, and,
leaping from the tangent, let it dart through the air, let it strike the
eddying waters, be sucked hurriedly down that hoarse black throat, wind
among the roots of the everlasting hills, and split upon the loadstone
of the centre.

Even such a fate, "down, down to hell," will come to Simon Jennings;
wrapped in the furs of complacency, seated in the sledge of
covetousness, a-down the slippery launch of well-worn evil habit--over
the precipice of crime--into the billows of impenitent remorse--to be
swallowed by the vortex of Gehenna!

CHAPTER XXV.

THE AMBUSCADE.

Night came, and with it all black thoughts. Not that they were
black at once, any more than darkness leaps upon the back of noon,
without the intervening cloak of twilight. Oh dear, no! Simon's thoughts
accommodated themselves fitly to the time of day. They had been, for
him, at early morning, pretty middling white, that is whity-brown;
thence they passed, with the passing hour kindly, through the shades of
burnt sienna, raw umber, and bistre; until, just as we may notice in the
case of marking-ink; that which, five minutes ago, was as water only
delicately dirtied, has become a fixed and indelible black.

Simon was resolved upon the spoil, come what might; although his waking
sensations of buoyancy, his noon-day cogitations of a calmer kind, and
his even-tide determined scheming, had now given way to a nervous and
unpleasant trepidation. So he poured spirits down to keep his spirits
up. Very early after dark, he had watched his opportunity while Mrs.
Quarles was scolding in the kitchen, had slipped shoeless and