streets, desperate and confused in mind, and fainting with hunger, and
half insane with fiery and wrong thoughts, which dashed over his
barren and gloomy soul, and desolated, but conquered not! It was
evening: he stood (for he had strode on so rapidly, at first, that his
strength was now exhausted, and he was forced to pause) leaning
against the railed area of a house in a lone and unfrequented street.
No passenger shared this dull and obscure thoroughfare. He stood,
literally, in scene as in heart, solitary amidst the great city, and
wherever he looked, lo, there were none!

"Two days," said he, slowly and faintly, "two days, and bread has only
once passed my lips; and that was snatched from her,--from those lips
which I have fed with sweet and holy kisses, and whence my sole
comfort in this weary life has been drawn. And she,--ay, she
starves,--and my child too. They complain not; they murmur not: but
they lift up their eyes to me and ask for--Merciful God! Thou didst
make man in benevolence; Thou dost survey this world with a pitying
and paternal eye: save, comfort, cherish them, and crush me if Thou
wilt!"

At that moment a man darted suddenly from an obscure alley, and passed
Glendower at full speed; presently came a cry, and a shout, and a
rapid trampling of feet, and, in another moment, an eager and
breathless crowd rushed upon the solitude of the street.

"Where is he?" cried a hundred voices to Glendower,--"where,--which
road did the robber take?" But Glendower could not answer: his nerves
were unstrung, and his dizzy brain swam and reeled; and the faces
which peered upon him, and the voices which shrieked and yelled in his
ear, were to him as the forms and sounds of a ghastly and phantasmal