itself originally, I am almost ashamed to own, up to that prediction of
the Hungarian woman)--denied me steady light, anything--all in short
but a wandering ray of hope. It was right, of course, nay,
indispensable, that the circumstance of the muff should be strongly
insisted upon at the next examination, pressed against the prosecutor,
and sifted to the uttermost. An able lawyer would turn this to a
triumphant account; and it would be admirable as a means of pre-
engaging the good opinion as well as the sympathies of the public in
behalf of the prisoner. But, for its final effect--my conviction
remained, not to be shaken, that all would be useless; that our doom
had gone forth, and was irrevocable.

Let me not linger too much over those sad times. Morning came on as
usual; for it is strange, but true, that to the very wretched it seems
wonderful that times and seasons should keep their appointed courses in
the midst of such mighty overthrows, and such interruption to the
courses of their own wonted happiness and their habitual expectations.
Why should morning and night, why should all movements in the natural
world be so regular, whilst in the moral world all is so irregular and
anomalous? Yet the sun and the moon rise and set as usual upon the
mightiest revolutions of empire and of worldly fortune that this planet
ever beholds; and it is sometimes even a comfort to know that this will
be the case. A great criminal, sentenced to an agonizing punishment,
has derived a fortitude and a consolation from recollecting that the
day would run its inevitable course--that a day after all was
_but_ a day--that the mighty wheel of alternate light and darkness
must and would revolve--and that the evening star would rise as usual,
and shine with its untroubled lustre upon the dust and ashes of what
_had_ indeed suffered, and so recently, the most bitter pangs, but
would then have ceased to suffer. 'La Journee,' said Damien,