LITTLE NELL.

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"You may keep your gold I scorn it! but answer me, ye who can,

If the deed I have done before you be not the deed of a man."

He stepped but a short space backward, and from all the women and men

There were only sobs for answer, and the Mayor called for a pen,

And the great seal of the city, that he might read who ran ;

And the slave who saved St. Michael's went out from its door, a man.

22. DEATH AND BURIAL OF LITTLE NELL.

HE dead.

Sewes from trace of ! upon!

No sleep so beautiful and calm!

so free from trace of pain! so fair to look

She seemed a creature from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death.

She was dead; dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead. Her little bird-a poor, slight thing, the pressure of a finger might have crushed-was stirring. nimbly in its cage; and the strong heart of its childmistress was mute and motionless forever. And still her former self lay there, unaltered in this change. Yes! The old fireside had smiled on the same sweet face; it had passed like a dream through haunts of misery and care; at the door of the poor schoolmaster, on the summer evening, before the furnace-fire, upon the cold, wet night, at the still bed

4

side of the dying boy, there had been the same mild, lovely look.

She was dead. The ancient rooms she had seemed to fill with life, even while her own was ebbing fast; the garden she had tended; the eyes she had gladdened; the noiseless haunts of many a thoughtless hour; the paths she had trodden as it were but yesterday, I could know her no more.

And now the bell, the bell she had so often heard by day and night, rung its remorseless tone for her, so young, so beautiful, so good.

Decrepit age, and vigorous life, and blooming youth, and helpless infancy, poured forth, on crutches, in the pride of strength and health, in the full flush of promise, in the mere dawn of life, to gather round her tomb.

Along the crowded path they bore her now, pure as the newly-fallen snow that covered it, whose day on earth had been as fleeting.

They carried her to one old nook, where she had many and many a time sat musing, and laid their burden softly on the pavement. The light streamed on it through the colored window, a window where the boughs of trees were ever rustling in the summer, and where the birds sang sweetly all day long. With every breath of air that stirred among these branches in the sunshine, some trembling, changing light would fall upon her grave.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Many a young hand dropped in its little wreath; many a stifled sob was heard. Some - and they were not a few knelt down; all were sincere and truthful in their sorrow.

THE WIFE-MURDER.

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They saw the vault covered and the stone fixed down. Then, when the dusk of evening had come on, and not a sound disturbed the sacred stillness of the place; when the bright moon poured in her light on tomb and monument, on pillar, wall, and arch, and most of all (it seemed to them) upon her quiet grave, —in that calm time, when all outward things and inward thoughts teem with assurance of immortality, with tranquil and submissive hearts they turned away and left the child with God.

WE

23. THE WIFE-MURDER.

E charge that on the 9th day of September, 1857, the defendant administered to his wife a deadly dose of arsenic in coffee, and also in medicine, of which she died.

I am obliged to take you to that fatal chamber of her death, and recall the conduct of the defendant. There he sat on the side of the bed, holding his wife's hands across the chest, with face averted and eyes on the floor, neither moved by her cries of anguish nor by the terror of the trembling throng around him. Not a word of inquiry to those about him as to what they thought of her condition; not a word of hope, or fear, or anxiety; not a soothing whisper of courage or cheer to the tortured, fainting soul of his wife; not a caress; not the slightest attention; not even a recognition of her presence; but sullen and silent he sat, with his darkened soul nerved to the ordeal, awaiting the fearful issue.

Once, while bolstered up, she sought to recline her

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THE WIFE-MURDER.

pain-wearied form on his person, and clasped her fair, white arms around his neck. "Take them down," was his sullen command. "O, Hiram! I am so tired!" said the pleading, exhausted wife. "Take them down," was the repeated order of that loving husband. And that worthless neck, half redeemed by those white arms, could not for a moment be lent to stay that fainting form.

"O, my child! O, my mother!" fitfully moaned the dying girl, and darker and gloomier fell the scowling brows of the relentless murderer. "Hold my babe, to me once more," gasped the dying mother.

"She wants camphor," sullenly replied the husband, dashing to her death-foaming lips the abhorred liquid, more cruel than the soldier who thrust the myrrhdipped sponge to Him on the cross. He would not have denied the dying mother a last look of her babe. One shudder, and that once fair form, so comely to look upon, was a stark corpse, put to death, I aver, by persistent, cruel, remorseless murder.

Yet that patient, abused spirit was caught up, as we love to think, by white-winged messengers, whose feet, treading the impalpable air, bore her away from the earth, away from its infectious atmosphere, away from its night-projecting shadows, beyond the stars, to the bosom of the God from whence she sprang.

When the long meditated, brooded over, and remorselessly executed deed was accomplished, and his wife was hopelessly dead, there came in a piece of poor clown-acting and over-acting that stamps the whole miserable tragedy with another proof of its real character. 'O my God," cried the miserable wretch, "what shall I do?" Sure enough; we know what he had done; we know what he next did do.

A FAITHFUL PUBLIC COURSE.

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He who had listened to the cries and moans of his wife without a single quiver of the lip, and felt her congeal into death under his hand without a shudder, now went, deliberately, into the frenzy and madness of grief. In all the wide, wild vale of tears, around the cracks and crannies of all broken hearts, was never heard mourning like that.

There was one remarkable phenomenon in all this uttered woe; not a tear moistened his eye. And when suspicion began to lurk in the eyes of men, thoroughly alarmed, and fleeing from his crime and self, he mounted his buggy and started from the city. Cowering in its seat, and shrinking from the gaze of passers-by, he hurried on; on and on through the interminable streets; on by the endless rows of sentinel lamps whose eyes glared threateningly at him as he fled, until the houses became straggling, and the shadows of his horse, growing huge and shapeless, melted from the light of the last lamp into the solid darkness. And so the murderer went out into the great, empty, black night.

No

24. A FAITHFUL PUBLIC COURSE.

O man carries farther than I do the policy of making government pleasing to the people. But the widest range of this politic complaisance is confined within the limits of justice. I would not only consult the interest of the people, but I would cheerfully gratify their humors. We are all a sort of children that must be soothed and managed. I think I am not austere or formal in my nature. I would bear,