wretched victim nor the world at large was any better for such a
visitation, for it was neither remedial nor monitory. Ah, so it is!
The murderer is hung at Newgate, and if he himself is not improved by
the process, perhaps a few wicked people are frightened; but men and
women are put to a worse death every day by slow strangulation which
endures for a lifetime, and, as far as we can see, no lesson is
learned by anybody, and no good is done.

Zachariah, however, did not give way to despair, for he was not a man
to despair. His religion was a part of himself. He had immortality
before him, in which he thanked God there was no marrying nor giving
in marriage. This doctrine, however, did not live in him as the
other dogmas of his creed, for it was not one in which his intellect
had such a share. On the other hand, predestination was dear to him.
God knew him as closely as He knew the angel next His throne, and had
marked out his course with as much concern as that of the seraph.
What God's purposes were he did not know. He took a sort of sullen
pride in not knowing, and he marched along, footsore and wounded, in
obedience to the orders of his great Chief. Only thirty years old,
and only three months a husband, he had already learned renunciation.
There was to be no joy in life? Then he would be satisfied if it
were tolerable, and he strove to dismiss all his dreams and do his
best with what lay before him. Oh my hero! Perhaps somewhere or
other--let us hope it is true--a book is kept in which human worth is
duly appraised, and in that book, if such a volume there be, we shall
find that the divinest heroism is not that of the man who, holding
life cheap, puts his back against a wall, and is shot by Government
soldiers, assured that he will live ever afterwards as a martyr and
saint: a diviner heroism is that of the poor printer, who, in dingy,
smoky Rosoman Street, Clerkenwell, with forty years before him,