midst of others, and gloomy even in the sunshine, which it barely
suffers to penetrate through its iron grated windows. It is a
prison. The jailer has left his post at the summons of a stronger
authority than the sheriff's. But the prisoners? Did the messenger
of fate, when he shook open all the doors, respect the magistrate's
warrant and the judge's sentence, and leave the inmates of the
dungeons to be delivered by due course of earthly law? No; a new
trial has been granted in a higher court, which may set judge, jury,
and prisoner at its bar all in a row, and perhaps find one no less
guilty than another. The jail, like the whole earth, is now a
solitude, and has thereby lost something of its dismal gloom. But
here are the narrow cells, like tombs, only drearier and deadlier,
because in these the immortal spirit was buried with the body.
Inscriptions appear on the walls, scribbled with a pencil or
scratched with a rusty nail; brief words of agony, perhaps, or
guilt's desperate defiance to the world, or merely a record of a
date by which the writer strove to keep up with the march of life.
There is not a living eye that could now decipher these memorials.

Nor is it while so fresh from their Creator's hand that the new
denizens of earth--no, nor their descendants for a thousand years--
could discover that this edifice was a hospital for the direst
disease which could afflict their predecessors. Its patients bore
the outward marks of that leprosy with which all were more or less
infected. They were sick-and so were the purest of their brethren--
with the plague of sin. A deadly sickness, indeed! Feeling its
symptoms within the breast, men concealed it with fear and shame,
and were only the more cruel to those unfortunates whose pestiferous
sores were flagrant to the common eye. Nothing save a rich garment
could ever hide the plague-spot. In the course of the world's