Acting on this determination, he quietly returned to the camp, or city, where he soon learned that justice had overtaken Bill Dobell and Indian Peter. In further confirmation, the driver of the mail, as he drove from the town, some hours later in the night, showed him, as an object of interest, two figures pendent from the boughs of a solitary tree some hundred and fifty yards from the roadside, which tree had, it appeared, often served such a purpose before.
The driver, having come on from a distant station with the coach, was not so well acquainted with the antecedent particulars of this demonstration of justice, as was the passenger who sat by his side on the box; nor did he know the latter’s interest in the matter.
‘I do hear,’ continued the driver, ‘that Rube Steele was looked for to make a third; but it is calculated he made tracks in time. It is a good thing to get rid of such desperadoes as Bill Dobell and Indian Peter; but it’s an awful pity they missed Rube.’
The outside passenger kept his own counsel, being very well satisfied that his partner’s fate should remain unknown until he had placed at least a hundred leagues between himself and the mining town.
CONCERNING LOVE.
IN TWO PARTS.—PART I.
Love is a stupendous paradox. You cannot elaborate a theory with regard to it which shall be at once entirely consistent in itself and all-comprehensive in its application. You may note its manifestations, estimate its force, trace its progress, and speculate upon its potentialities; but how can you hope to reduce to a self-consistent philosophy its thousand-and-one contrarieties and its endless shades of diversity—its glowing triumphs, its merry comedies, its sad irrevocable catastrophes—its sweet reasonableness, its wild infatuation, and its incomprehensible eccentricities? There is perhaps no subject under the sun which has been a more constant theme of poets, essayists, and philosophers; but what is the net result of all that these have told us? It is a long category of heterogeneous and conflicting dicta or speculations, comprising, it is true, many sage reflections, accurate observations, and charming fancies, but, as a whole, presenting rather the aspect of a kaleidoscopic view than that of an intelligible and harmonious picture.
Though the praise of love has been more common than its disparagement, there are not wanting those who have been disposed to treat the subject with irony and ridicule. It was Laurence Sterne who said that the expression ‘fall in love’ evidently showed love to be beneath a man. This was no doubt intended for nothing more than a facetious play upon the words; but there are numerous writers, both before and after Sterne, who have ridiculed the votaries of the tender passion and disparaged the god Cupid. Bacon speaks of love as ‘this weak passion,’ and quotes with approval the remark, that ‘it is impossible to love and be wise.’ Cervantes satirises the extravagances of the amorous passion to the top of his bent in the adventures of his mad hero Don Quixote, in whose fantasy and mock-heroic panegyrics love is a never-absent theme; indeed, it is an essential element of his madness, for he is made to declare that ‘the knight-errant that is loveless resembles a tree that wants leaves and fruit, or a body without a soul.’
Certain of Shakspeare’s creations also join in this detraction, and the lover and the lunatic are placed in the same category, as—with the poet—‘of imagination all compact;’ while one of his characters—the fair Rosalind—declares: ‘Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do.’ The affinity of love and madness has formed the subject of much learned disquisition, and the general testimony would seem to show that there must be numerous instances in which it might be said, adapting Dryden’s couplet on the subject of ‘great wits:’
Great love is sure to madness near allied,