"His power! what mean you?"
"What ho! Birnie!" cried Gawtrey, unheeding Morton's question. "Let us halt and breakfast: I am tired."
"You forget!—we have no money till we make it," returned Birnie, coldly.—"Come to the serrurier's he will trust us."
CHAPTER VIII.
"Gaunt Beggary and Scorn with many bell-hounds more."
THOMSON'S Castle of Indolence.
"The other was a fell, despiteful fiend."—Ibid.
"Your happiness behold! then straight a wand
He waved, an anti-magic power that hath
Truth from illusive falsehood to command."—Ibid.
"But what for us, the children of despair,
Brought to the brink of hell—what hope remains?
RESOLVE, RESOLVE!"—Ibid.
It may be observed that there are certain years in which in a civilised country some particular crime comes into vogue. It flares its season, and then burns out. Thus at one time we have Burking—at another, Swingism—now, suicide is in vogue—now, poisoning tradespeople in apple- dumplings—now, little boys stab each other with penknives—now, common soldiers shoot at their sergeants. Almost every year there is one crime peculiar to it; a sort of annual which overruns the country but does not bloom again. Unquestionably the Press has a great deal to do with these epidemics. Let a newspaper once give an account of some out-of-the-way atrocity that has the charm of being novel, and certain depraved minds fasten to it like leeches. They brood over and revolve it—the idea grows up, a horrid phantasmalian monomania; and all of a sudden, in a hundred different places, the one seed sown by the leaden types springs up into foul flowering.
[An old Spanish writer, treating of the Inquisition, has some very striking remarks on the kind of madness which, whenever some terrible notoriety is given to a particular offence, leads persons of distempered fancy to accuse themselves of it. He observes that when the cruelties of the Inquisition against the imaginary crime of sorcery were the most barbarous, this singular frenzy led numbers to accuse themselves of sorcery. The publication and celebrity of the crime begat the desire of the crime.]