[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. The next day
the poor old creature was found dead in his hut--his brains beaten out
with an old iron implement which he used--and his little furniture rifled,
and in confusion. The wretch had murdered him for the supposed hoard of a
few shillings. The snow, from which he afforded his murderer shelter, had
drifted in at the door, which the miscreant, when he fled, had left open,
and was frozen red with the blood of his victim. But it betrayed a
footstep hard frozen in the snow, and blood--and the nails of the
murderer's shoe were counted, even as his days were soon to be. He was