first I felt a dislike creep through me at the stranger, which indeed it
was easy to account for. He was of a careless and somewhat insolent
manner. His countenance was impressed with the lines and character of a
thousand vices: you read in the brow and eye the history of a sordid yet
reckless life. His conversation was repellent to me beyond expression. He
uttered the meanest sentiments, and he chuckled over them as the maxims
of a superior sagacity; he avowed himself a knave upon system, and upon
the lowest scale. To overreach, to deceive, to elude, to shuffle, to
fawn, and to lie, were the arts that he confessed to with so naked and
cold a grossness, that one perceived that in the long habits of
debasement he was unconscious of what was not debased. Houseman seemed to
draw him out: he told us anecdotes of his rascality, and the distresses
to which it had brought him; and he finished by saying: 'Yet you see me
now almost rich, and wholly contented. I have always been the luckiest of
human beings; no matter what ill-chances to-day, good turns up to-morrow.
I confess that I bring on myself the ill, and Providence sends me
the good.' We met accidentally more than once, and his conversation was
always of the same strain--his luck and his rascality: he had no other
theme, and no other boast. And did not this stir into gloomy speculation
the depths of my mind? Was it not an ordination that called upon men to
take fortune in their own hands, when Fate lavished her rewards on this
low and creeping thing, that could only enter even Vice by its sewers and
alleys? Was it worth while to be virtuous, and look on, while the bad
seized upon the feast of life? This man was instinct with the basest
passions, the pettiest desires: he gratified them, and Fate smiled upon
his daring. I, who had shut out from my heart the poor temptations of
sense--I, who fed only the most glorious visions, the most august
desires--I, denied myself their fruition, trembling and spell-bound in
the cerements of human laws, without hope, without reward,--losing the
very powers of virtue because I would not stray into crime.