He was too well accustomed to suffering, and had suffered too much where he was, to bewail the prospect of change very severely.

He remained lost in thought for some minutes; and then, with a heavy sigh, snuffed the candle, and, taking up the book which the Jew had left with him, began to read.
He turned over the leaves.

Carelessly at first; but, lighting on a passage which attracted his attention, he soon became intent upon the volume.

It was a history of the lives and trials of great criminals; and the pages were soiled and thumbed with use.

Here, he read of dreadful crimes that made the blood run cold; of secret murders that had been committed by the lonely wayside; of bodies hidden from the eye of man in deep pits and wells: which would not keep them down, deep as they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony.
Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night, had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts, to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh creep, and the limbs quail, to think of.