made my blood run cold. By degrees even these tokens of life ceased--the
last lamp was entirely shut from our view--we were in utter darkness.

"We are near our journey's end now," whispered Jonson

At these words a thousand unwelcome reflections forced themselves
voluntarily on my mind: I was about to plunge into the most secret
retreat of men whose long habits of villany and desperate abandonment,
had hardened into a nature which had scarcely a sympathy with my own;
unarmed and defenceless, I was going to penetrate a concealment upon
which their lives perhaps depended; what could I anticipate from their
vengeance, but the sure hand and the deadly knife, which their self-
preservation would more than justify to such lawless reasoners. And who
was my companion? One, who literally gloried in the perfection of his
nefarious practices; and who, if he had stopped short of the worst
enormities, seemed neither to disown the principle upon which they were
committed, nor to balance for a moment between his interest and his
conscience.

Nor did he attempt to conceal from me the danger to which I was exposed;
much as his daring habits of life, and the good fortune which had
attended him, must have hardened his nerves, even he, seemed fully
sensible of the peril he incurred--a peril certainly considerably less
than that which attended my temerity. Bitterly did I repent, as these
reflections rapidly passed my mind, my negligence in not providing myself
with a single weapon in case of need: the worst pang of death, is the
falling without a struggle.

However, it was no moment for the indulgence of fear, it was rather one
of those eventful periods which so rarely occur in the monotony of common