Idiocy, insanity, poverty, moral debasement, disease in a thousand repulsive forms, all these had frightened and disgusted him.

On the direct road to one of these terrible goals he had been traveling.

He knew it, and, with a shudder many times repeated, felt it.

He had been arrested in the downward road, and, God helping him, he would never resume it.

He had witnessed brutal cruelties and neglect among officials that maddened him.