the Winter cannot stand, that soft-subduing
slumber which wrestles down the giant, there is not one human creature
in a million--not a thousand men in all earth's huge quintillion, whose
clay-heart is hardened against love.

Yet was Julian one of those select ones; an awful instance of that
possible, that actual, though happily that scarcest of all characters, a
man,

"Black, with _no_ virtue, and a thousand crimes."

The amiable villain--one whose generosity redeems his guilt, whose
kindliness outweighs his folly, or whose beauty charms the eye to
overlook his baseness--this too common hero is an object, an example
fraught with perilous interest. Charles Duval, the polite; Paul
Clifford, the handsome; Richard Turpin, brave and true; Jack Sheppard,
no ignoble mind and loving still his mother; these, and such as these,
with Schiller's '_Robbers_' and the like, are dangerous to gaze on, as
Germany, if not England too, remembers well. But, not more true to life,
though far less common to be met with, is Julian's incorrigible mind:
one, in whose life are no white days; one, on whose heart are no bright
spots; when Heaven's pity spoke to him, he ridiculed; as, when His
threatenings thundered, he defied. Of this world only, and tending to a
worse appetite was all he lived for: and the core of appetite is iron
selfishness.

The filched cash-box proved to be too well-filled for him to trouble
himself with thinking of his mother yet awhile: and his smuggling
acquaintances, a rough-featured, blasphemous crew, set him as their
chief, so long as he swore loudest, drank deepest, and had money at
command. He hid the money, that they should not secretly steal from him
that to which he owed his bad supremacy; and his double-barrels, shotted
to the muzzle, were far too formidable for any hope of getting at it by
open brute force. Nevertheless, they were "fine high-spirited" fellows
those, bold, dark men, of Julian's own kidney; who toasted in their cups
each other's crimes, and the ghost or two that ought to have been
haunting them.

CHAPTER XXIII.

CONVALESCENCE.

Very slowly did Emily recover, for the blow had been more than she could
bear: nothing but religion gave her any chance at all: and the phials,
blisterings, bleedings, would have been in vain, in vain--she must have
died long ago--had it not been for the remembrance of God's love,
resignation to His will, and trust in the wisdom of his Providence. But