springs. I greeted in breathless silence, not his confession alone, but what confirmed it, this expressive token of his remorse; my own tears began to flow, but mine were tears of satisfaction and pleasure. He continued ; "But I should wish you to understand, Sir, that many things said of me are quite false. I have no desire to make excuses for myself any longer; but I would not rest, without speaking, under the weight of so much slander. Perhaps I might have uttered the few words which you have mentioned, Sir; but I am sure that I added nothing wicked or reproachful. My meaning has been perverted, Sir, entirely from the truth. No, no, Sir! I was in no condition then to talk in that manner. The last look which I took of my wife; the recollection of what she said as she fell; the waking, restless hours which I passed in my hiding-place; the cold, tempestuous night, which I felt the more from being without shelter over head, abated my passion, and sobered me, if I was intoxicated, and completely brought me back to myself; to a fearful sense of my own danger, and to a painful remembrance of what I had done to her. No, no, Sir! All the rancour which preyed upon my vitals before, and urged me on to desperation, was then quite burnt out; it upheld my spirits no more; I saw where I had sunk; I was without power to act, or to think for my own safety. When the sky was streaked with the first light, I rose up from amidst the tall beans, where I had couched, and had been quaking at every sound; I rose up, Sir, indeed, and attempted to escape; but it was. only seeming to attempt it; for my limbs had lost their spring; guilt had palsied their sinews; I bid them move, but they denied me.

Or would you be

lieve, Sir, that I could have been taken as I was? By one of far less speed, of far less strength, of far less courage?"

As he spoke thus, his tone became more vehement, and his face for an instant assumed a different character. A sudden glow of anger flashed over it; he looked fiercely, as if he were about to rush to the combat; he was proud in the consciousness of superiority. But soon relaxing into his former tone, he continued thus: "No, no, Sir! My guilt had cowed me, and I cared not what became of me. I was in no condition or temper to use the words which they falsely imputed to me. I wished for death, not because I had glutted my fury, but because I saw only woe before me in life."

"Well," I said, "this must be left, like many other things, to your own conscience. You must examine it without shrinking, and search to the very bottom with an inflexible severity: for if you yourself do not, God will, you may be sure; and it is much better that you should do it, than he. And I will tell you plainly, that whoever might be capable of speaking such words at such a moment can have nothing of human nature about him. At least he must be sunk below the lowest condition of man, living in savage wilds, without social intercourse, without domestic charities, without law, without God and religion. But it is too true that such wretched beings exist sometimes even amongst civilized men. They have neglected God, his word, and his worship; and so he has cast them off, and given them up to their own lusts and furious passions; and thus they plunge into crimes which savages themselves would blush at or abhor. You have neglected religion, Jacob; I

know it well; and so your passions have been growing up to get the mastery over you; they had no strong tie to bind them; they had little of natural tenderness to soften them. For although I might acquit you, and you might acquit yourself of that last atrocity, yet no man will acquit you, nor you yourself, of most atrocious cruelty. It came home, it seems, to your own bosom with an avenging pang, at the very instant of your flight. You were reported at your trial to have been an indulgent husband ; and your poor wife herself, I know, even after you had beat her repeatedly, still allowed it, and appeared to be glad to mention every instance of your love for her. But, Oh! Brockbourn, where was this love, when you seized such a murderous implement as that rake with its iron teeth; when you brandished it in your hands, and smote all around you with undistinguishing rage, and shattered everything that came in its way; and still more, where was your love, when she besought your mercy, and adjured you perhaps by the recollection of all your former mutual endearments, and fell to the ground exclaiming that you had killed her; yet you continued your strokes, without one tender thought to stop your uplifted hand, upon her poor fractured and streaming head, beating the ground itself too on each side in your fury, until her tongue could no longer intreat your pity, nor her eye look up to you with the expectation of it; in short, until she was speechless, and senseless and her eyes closed, apparently to open no more in this world. No memory of past kindnesses between you both once occurred; no faint spark of affection once rekindled itself within you; everything sacred, everything dear in your connexion with her, was driven from your

breast; your own eye neither pitied, nor spared. But I can proceed no farther with the description of such a scene as this; I will hasten to that which follows."

I had now touched, at length, the right chord for stirring his softer emotions, if he had any; and it appeared that he had. Unconcerned myself, yet, by the mere force of imagination, I had worked myself up to a high pitch of feeling; but Jacob Brockbourn wept now in earnest; these things were no empty imaginations to him; these were substantial, dire realities. He wept aloud and sore, like Esau; and like him he could not undo the past. I contemplated him, as I had done before, with compassion; but a thought came suddenly and forcibly into my mind, which, I knew, must create him still more pain, and yet my duty required that I should give it vent, to warn him. "Ah! mark," I said, solemnly and devoutly, "mark the displeasure and the judgment of God upon this connexion of yours with Mary Brockbourn! It began in lust; it has ended in death. To make that connexion you transgressed God's laws; you broke it by a worse transgression than the firstyou corrupted her, and now you have slain her. You attempted indeed to cast a veil over your earlier sin by the sacred ceremony of marriage: but your marriage was a profanation of all that is sacred, and God would not bless it. No, the rite must be hallowed by modesty, by chastity, by purity of manners and heart, to draw down upon it the favourable regard of heaven. These beautiful graces were not in your train when you entered the temple of God, and they did not accompany you back from thence. You went there no more to ask him to sanctify this deed; you thought not of him; you lived without him; but

6

he was preparing a bitter recompense, and at length he emptied the vial of his wrath upon you. Mark this, and shun the incitements of lust; when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.""

He was deeply struck with this brief history of himself, and with the new world of providences which I had now opened to his view. Every symptom of an agitated mind was renewed, and tears, more and more abundant, were superadded to the rest; but his tears seemed to relieve him from the effects of the other more painful symptoms, and to restore the faculty of speech. However, it was not long after I stopped, and before I had fixed upon any probable method of still further awakening his conscience and setting it to work, when he broke the silence himself, and told his own story with correspondent gestures, forcibly and pathetically, and I think very nearly thus :

me.

"Yes, Sir," he said, "it is true enough. From the beginning to the ending God has not been with How should he? I was sinning against him continually; I see it now, and I will make no more vain excuses to myself, or to you, Sir. But hear me, Sir, I beseech you, for a few minutes, whilst I relate the circumstances of the last unlucky night. Whoever knows them will have some compassion upon me at the least, I am sure, even whilst he condemns me, and hates me for my deed. As I came near to the cluster of cottages, Sir, I heard loud and confused sounds of merriment. Ah! I said to myself, trembling with alarm and fear, surely my Mary is not amongst those riotous people! Surely, she has not forgotten, so soon, the correction which I

gave