about his thoughts; in a dream, as it were, he strikes the death-blow into his victim’s heart and starts to find an indelible blood-stain on his hand.  Thus a novel-writer or a dramatist, in creating a villain of romance and fitting him with evil deeds, and the villain of actual life in projecting crimes that will be perpetrated, may almost meet each other halfway between reality and fancy.  It is not until the crime is accomplished that Guilt clenches its gripe upon the guilty heart and claims it for his own.  Then, and not before, sin is actually felt and acknowledged, and, if unaccompanied by repentance, grows a thousandfold more virulent by its self-consciousness.  Be it considered, also, that men often overestimate their capacity for evil.  At a distance, while its attendant circumstances do not press upon their notice and its results are dimly seen, they can bear to contemplate it.  They may take the steps which lead to crime, impelled by the same sort of mental action as in working out a mathematical problem, yet be powerless with compunction at the final moment.  They knew not what deed it was that they deemed themselves resolved to do.  In truth, there is no such thing in man’s nature as a settled and full resolve, either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.  Let us hope, therefore, that all the dreadful consequences of sin will not be incurred unless the act have set its seal upon the thought.

Yet, with the slight fancy-work which we have framed, some sad and awful truths are interwoven.  Man must not disclaim his brotherhood even with the guiltiest, since, though his hand be clean, his heart has surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity.  He must feel that when he shall knock at the gate of heaven no semblance of an unspotted life can entitle him to entrance there.  Penitence must kneel and Mercy come from the footstool of the throne, or that golden gate will never open.

DR. HEIDEGGER’S EXPERIMENT.

That very singular man old Dr. Heidegger once invited four venerable friends to meet him in his study.  There were three white-bearded gentlemen—­Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew and Mr. Gascoigne—­and a withered gentlewoman whose name was the widow Wycherly.  They were all melancholy old creatures who had been unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they were not long ago in their graves.  Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous merchant, but had lost his all by a frantic speculation, and was now little better than a mendicant.  Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years and his health and substance in the pursuit of sinful pleasures which had given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout and divers other torments of soul and body.  Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician, a man of evil fame—­or, at least, had been so till time had buried him from the knowledge of the present generation