themselves, or whose appearance in any respect answered to the imperfect
description of Williams furnished by the watchman.

With this mighty tide of pity and indignation pointing backwards to the
dreadful past, there mingled also in the thoughts of reflecting persons an
under-current of fearful expectation for the immediate future. 'The
earthquake,' to quote a fragment from a striking passage in Wordsworth--

'The earthquake is not satisfied at once.'

All perils, specially malignant, are recurrent. A murderer, who is such by
passion and by a wolfish craving for bloodshed as a mode of unnatural
luxury, cannot relapse into _inertia_. Such a man, even more than the
Alpine chamois hunter, comes to crave the dangers and the hairbreadth
escapes of his trade, as a condiment for seasoning the insipid monotonies
of daily life. But, apart from the hellish instincts that might too surely
be relied on for renewed atrocities, it was clear that the murderer of the
Marrs, wheresoever lurking, must be a needy man; and a needy man of that
class least likely to seek or to find resources in honorable modes of
industry; for which, equally by haughty disgust and by disuse of the
appropriate habits, men of violence are specially disqualified. Were it,
therefore, merely for a livelihood, the murderer whom all hearts were
yearning to decipher, might be expected to make his resurrection on some
stage of horror, after a reasonable interval. Even in the Marr murder,
granting that it had been governed chiefly by cruel and vindictive
impulses, it was still clear that the desire of booty had co-operated with
such feelings. Equally clear it was that this desire must have been
disappointed: excepting the trivial sum reserved by Marr for the week's
expenditure, the murderer found, doubtless, little or nothing that he
could turn to account. Two guineas, perhaps, would be the outside of what