* * * * *
[We need not illustrate the force, or point the moral of the following
sketch from the last number of _Blackwood's Magazine_. The parents of the
writer were of "a serious cast," and attached to evangelical tenets, which
he soon imbibed, together with an occasional tendency to gloom and nervous
irritability.]
About the year 1790, at the Assizes for the county of which the town of
C----r is the county town, was tried and convicted a wretch guilty of one
of the most horrible murders upon record. He was a young man, probably (for
he knew not his own years) of about twenty-two years of age. One of those
wandering and unsettled creatures, who seem to be driven from place to
place, they know not why. Without home; without name; without companion;
without sympathy; without sense. Hearthless, friendless, idealess, almost
soulless! and so ignorant, as not even to seem to know whether he had ever
heard of a Redeemer, or seen his written word. It was on a stormy
Christmas eve, when he begged shelter in the hut of an old man, whose
office it was to regulate the transit of conveyances upon the road of a
great mining establishment in the neighbourhood. The old man had received
him, and shared with him his humble cheer and his humble bed; for on that
night the wind blew and the sleet drove, after a manner that would have
made it a crime to have turned a stranger dog to the door.
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