ners." This would have been an awful crime, I admit. Don't you think so? And you believe me guilty in my mind to commit this act; but, when I tell how it would have occurred, if I had not been detecting the matter, you will not believe me. This is the way:—Poisoned figs having been smuggled into my cell, for myself to swallow and die on; but, as I had often handed my keeper and two prison-runners some of my edibles, I was about dealing out to them these poisoned figs—and had already knocked at the cell door for them to come and get them, when they did not come immediately; in the meantime I opened the package and thought I would eat a few, but opened them and thus discovered the poison. Hence burned them.
There is a certain stage of some men's lives, when they should be brave enough to become egotistical. It is at that period when they have become masters of their business. But, before they have reached the
