There is another feature in the prisoner at Toronto that seems strangely corroborative of what we are desirous properly to establish, that is his age. He acknowledges to be fifty-five years of age, and although this would make him somewhat older than his real age, yet it fixes this point—that the prisoner at Toronto is well advanced in years, and so must the subject of our Memoirs be also.
From information which we have obtained it seems that he has undergone his trial, and was committed to the penitentiary for a year’s confinement. Whether he found any means of effecting an exemption from labor in the penitentiary and then reconciling himself to his confinement, or whether he accomplished one of his ingenious departures, we are unable to determine. One thing however, is highly probable—that he is again going up and down in the earth in the practice of his hoary-headed villainy, except Power from on High has directed the arrow of conviction to heart; for no inferior impulse would be capable of giving a new direction to the life and actions of a man whose habits of iniquity have been ripened into maturity and obtained an immovable ascendancy by the practice of so many successive years.
It must be acknowledged that there is an unprecedented degree of cleverness in all his adventures, which casts a kind of illusive and momentary covering over the real character of his actions, and would seem to engage an interest in his favor, (and this is an error to which the human mind seems remarkable pre-disposed when vice presents itself before us in all its cleverness), yet who can read his miserable career without feeling pained at the melancholy picture of depravity it presents? Who would have supposed that after his condemnation and sentence at Kingston, and his life, by an act of human mercy, given into his hands again, he would not have hastened to his sorrowing little wife, and with tears of compunction, mingled with those of joy, cast himself upon her neck and resolved by a course of future rectitude and honesty, to make her as happy as his previous disgraceful and sinful career had made her miserable.
But ah! no. His release was followed by no such effects. Rendered unsusceptible for every natural and tender impression, and yet under the full dominion of the god of this world, he abandoned the intimate of his bosom, and set out single handed in the fresh pursuit of crime.