le, the reader
might justly reckon it to me for a sin and shame. For more than twelve
long years I have borne it in my memory, and could now reproduce it as
freshly as if it were still before my eyes. Of all modes of death,
methinks it is the ugliest. Her wet garments swathed limbs of terrible
inflexibility. She was the marble image of a death-agony. Her arms
had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and were bent before her with
clenched hands; her knees, too, were bent, and--thank God for it!--in
the attitude of prayer. Ah, that rigidity! It is impossible to bear
the terror of it. It seemed,--I must needs impart so much of my own
miserable idea,--it seemed as if her body must keep the same position
in the coffin, and that her skeleton would keep it in the grave; and
that when Zenobia rose at the day of judgment, it would be in just the
same attitude as now!

One hope I had, and that too was mingled half with fear. She knelt as
if in prayer. With the last, choking consciousness, her soul, bubbling
out through her lips, it may be, had given itself up to the Father,
reconciled and penitent. But her arms! They were bent before her, as
if she struggled against Providence in never-ending hostility. Her
hands! They were clenched in immitigable defiance. Away with the
hideous thought. The flitting moment after Zenobia sank into the dark
pool--when her breath was gone, and her soul at her lips was as long,
in its capacity of God's infinite forgiveness, as the lifetime of the
world!

Foster bent over the body, and carefully examined it.

"You have wounded the poor thing's breast," said he to Hollingsworth,
"close by her heart, too!"

"Ha!" cried Hollingsworth with a start.

And so he had, indeed, both before and after death!

"See!" said Foster. "That's the place where the iron struck her. It
looks cruelly, but she never felt it!"

He endeavored to arrange the arms of the corpse decently by its side.
His utmost strength, however, scarcely sufficed to bring them down; and
rising again, the next instant, they bade him defiance, exactly as
before. He made another effort, with the same result.

"In God's name, Silas Foster," cried I with bitter indignation, "let
that dead woman alone!"

"Why, man, it's not decent!" answered he, staring at me in amazement.
"I can't bear to see her looking so! Well, well," added he, after a
third effort, "'tis of no use, sure enough; and we must leave the women
to do the