make a present to the poor creature of its throat? Oh no! impossible!
Throats are a sort of thing that he never makes presents of; business--
business must be attended to. Really the two men, considered simply as men
of business, are both meritorious. Like chorus and semi-chorus, strophe
and antistrophe, they work each against the other. Pull journeyman, pull
murderer! Pull baker, pull devil! As regards the journeyman, he is now
safe. To his sixteen feet, of which seven are neutralized by the distance
of the bed, he has at last added six feet more, which will be short of
reaching the ground by perhaps ten feet--a trifle which man or boy may
drop without injury. All is safe, therefore, for him: which is more than
one can be sure of for miscreant in the parlor. Miscreant, however, takes
it coolly enough: the reason being, that, with all his cleverness, for
once in his life miscreant has been over-reached. The reader and I know,
but miscreant does not in the least suspect, a little fact of some
importance, viz., that just now through a space of full three minutes he
has been overlooked and studied by one, who (though reading in a dreadful
book, and suffering under mortal panic) took accurate notes of so much as
his limited opportunities allowed him to see, and will assuredly report
the creaking shoes and the silk-mounted surtout in quarters where such
little facts will tell very little to his advantage. But, although it is
true that Mr. Williams, unaware of the journeyman's having 'assisted' at
the examination of Mrs. Williamson's pockets, could not connect any
anxiety with that person's subsequent proceedings', nor specially,
therefore, with his having embarked in the rope-weaving line, assuredly he
knew of reasons enough for not loitering. And yet he _did_ loiter.
Reading his acts by the light of such mute traces as he left behind him,
the police became aware that latterly he must have loitered. And the
reason which governed him is striking; because at once it records--that
murder was not pursued by him simply as a means to an end, but also as an
end for itself. Mr. Williams had now been upon the premises for perhaps