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amid the densest foliage, all in vain. Here are the very nooks where the
unwashed most abound--here are the temples most desecrate. With sickness
of the heart the wanderer will flee back to the polluted Paris as to
a less odious because less incongruous sink of pollution. But if the
vicinity of the city is so beset during the working days of the week,
how much more so on the Sabbath! It is now especially that, released
from the claims of labor, or deprived of the customary opportunities of
crime, the town blackguard seeks the precincts of the town, not through
love of the rural, which in his heart he despises, but by way of escape
from the restraints and conventionalities of society. He desires
less the fresh air and the green trees, than the utter license of the
country. Here, at the road-side inn, or beneath the foliage of the
woods, he indulges, unchecked by any eye except those of his boon
companions, in all the mad excess of a counterfeit hilarity--the joint
offspring of liberty and of rum. I say nothing more than what must
be obvious to every dispassionate observer, when I repeat that the
circumstance of the articles in question having remained undiscovered,
for a longer period--than from one Sunday to another, in any thicket in
the immediate neighborhood of Paris, is to be looked upon as little less
than miraculous.
"But there are not wanting other grounds for the suspicion that the
articles were placed in the thicket with the view of diverting attention
from the real scene of the outrage. And, first, let me direct your
notice to the date of the discovery of the articles. Collate this with
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