riot; to make the soul itself hard, impious, barren.'"

Hazlet, ashamed and bewildered, confused his present position with old
reminiscences, and muttered some balderdash about Carlyle "not being
sound."

"Carlyle not sound?" said Julian; "good heavens! You can still retain
the wretched babblements of your sectarianism while your courses are
what they are!"

He was inclined to drop the conversation in sheer disgust, but Hazlet's
pride was now aroused, and he began to bluster about the impertinence of
interference on Julian's part, and his right to do what he chose.

"Certainly," said Julian, sternly, "the choice lies with yourself. Run,
if you will, as a bird to the snare of the fowler, till a dart strike
you through. But if you are dead and indifferent to your own miserable
soul, think that in this sin you cannot sin alone; think that you are
dragging down to the nethermost abyss others besides yourself. Remember
the wretched victims of your infamous passions, and tremble while you
desecrate and deface for ever God's image stamped on a fair human soul.
Think of those whom your vileness dooms to a life of loathliness, a
death of shame and anguish, perhaps an eternity of horrible despair.
Learn something of the days they are forced to spend, that they may
pander to the worst instincts of your degraded nature; days of squalor
and drunkenness, disease and dirt; gin at morning, noon, and night;
eating infection, horrible madness, and sudden death at the end. Can
you ever hope for salvation and the light of God's presence, while the
cry of the souls of which you have been _the murderer_--yes, do not
disguise it, the _murderer_, the cruel, willing, pitiless murderer--is
ringing upwards from the depths of hell?"

"What do you mean by the murderer?" said Hazlet, with an attempt at
misconception.

"I mean this, Hazlet; setting aside all considerations which affect your
mere personal ruin--not mentioning the atrophy of spiritual life and the
clinging sense of degradation which is involved in such a course as
yours--I want you to see if you will be honest, that the fault is yet
more deadly, because you involve _other_ souls and _other_ lives in your
own destruction. Is it not a reminiscence sufficient to kill any man's
hope, that but for his own brutality some who are now perhaps raving in
the asylum might have been clasping their own children to their happy
breasts, and wearing in unpolluted innocence the rose of mat