 disgust, and some of them argued a mind of such a
stretch of depravity as to many readers would appear utterly incredible. And yet
this man had his virtues. He was enterprising, persevering and faithful.
    His removal was a considerable benefit to me. It would have been no small
hardship to have been turned adrift immediately under my unfavourable
circumstances, with the additional disadvantage of the wound I had received; and
yet I could scarcely have ventured to remain under the same roof with a man to
whom my appearance was as a guilty conscience, perpetually reminding him of his
own offence and the counteraction of his leader. His profession accustomed him
to a certain degree of indifference to consequences and indulgence to the
sallies of passion, and he might easily have found his opportunity to insult or
injure me when I should have had nothing but my own debilitated exertions to
protect me.
    Freed from this danger, I found my situation sufficiently fortunate for a
man under my circumstances. It was attended with all the advantages for
concealment my fondest imagination could have hoped; and it was by no means
destitute of the benefits which arise from kindness and humanity. Nothing could
be more unlike than the thieves I had seen in - jail and the thieves of my new
residence. The latter were generally full of chearfulness and merriment. They
could expatiate freely wherever they thought proper. They could form plans and
execute them. They consulted their inclinations. They did not impose upon
themselves the task, as is too often the case in human society, of seeming
tacitly to approve that from which they suffered most; or, which is worse, of
persuading themselves that all the wrongs they suffered were right; but were at
open war with their oppressors. On the contrary the imprisoned felons I had
lately seen were shut up like wild beasts in a cage, deprived of activity and
palsied with indolence. The occasional demonstrations that still remained of
their former enterprising life, were the starts and convulsions of disease, not
the meditated and consistent exertions of a mind in health. They had no more of
hope, of project, of golden and animated dreams, but were reserved to the most
dismal prospects, and forbidden to think upon any other topic. It is true that
these two scenes were parts of one whole, the one the consummation, the hourly
to be expected successor of the other. But the men I now saw were wholly
inattentive to this, and in that respect appeared to hold no commerce with
reflection or reason.
    I might in one view, as I have said, congratulate myself upon my present
residence; it answered completely the purposes
