Page:OptimismBlood.djvu/102

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wards; perchance the compensation went before; but there is compensation afterwards as well.

Everywhere we turn our eyes but to behold some manner of compensation. We have taken great pleasure in a volume of criminal history now in our possession. How certain is the retribution of crime! He that has the disposition for evil never has the wit for concealment. Murder will out. The brand of Cain is on it. Look where men of known sagacity have committed murder: they became fools incontinently. Men who in their cooler moments could devise a hundred ways to murder without a chance of detection, when once the love of blood enters their hearts become incapable of deception.

Still, as we go on, a compensation for the stings of conscience and the sense of degradation shows itself in men's lives. The idle, the vagrant and the vicious—the loafer, the robber, the drunkard, the prostitute, all grow in an exaltation of the moral or enduring nature—in a sense of lofty though occasional liberty, which none better than the outcast can understand. There is a charm in the consciousness of vagrancy—a spirit that cries out

"A fig for those by law protected! Liberty's a glorious feast; Courts for cowards were erected— Churches built to please the priest!"

There is pride and power in the defiance of law;—"and the joy that is sweetest lurks in stings of remorse."—Of all men, the sailor, in his sea-girt prison, leads a life most monotonous: yet is he a

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