e invincible queen. Elizabeth
yielded herself to the spirit of submissive piety, and fell asleep upon
the bosom of her Savior. Our thoughts would more willingly follow her to
those mansions of rest, where faith instructs us that she winged her
flight, than turn again to the prison where the orphan children lingered
in solitude and woe.

Young Louis was left in one of the apartments of the Temple, under the
care of the brutal Simon, whose commission it was to _get quit of him_.
To send a child of seven years of age to the guillotine because his
father was a king, was a step which the Revolutionary Tribunal _then_
was hardly willing to take, out of regard to the opinions of the world.
It would be hardly consistent with the character of the great nation to
_poison_ the child; and yet, while he lived, there was a rallying point
around which the sympathies of royalty could congregate. _Louis must
die!_ Simon must not _kill_ him; he must not _poison_ him; he must _get
quit of him_. The public safety demands it. Patriotism demands it. In
the accomplishment of this undertaking, the young prince was shut up
alone, entirely alone, like a caged beast, in one of the upper rooms of
a tower of the Temple. There he was left, day and night, week after
week, and month after month, with no companion, with no employment, with
no food for thought, with no opportunity for exercise or to breathe the
fresh air. A flagon of water, seldom replenished, was placed at his
bedside. The door was occasionally half opened, and some coarse food
thrown in to the poor child. He never washed himself. For more than a
year, his clothes, his shirt, and his shoes had never been changed. For
six months his bed was not made, and the unhappy child, consigned to
this living burial, remained silent and immovable upon the impure
pallet, breathing his own infection. By long inactivity his limbs
became rigid. His mind, by the dead inaction which succeeded terror,
lost its energy, and became, not only brutalized, but depraved. The
noble child of warm affections, polished manners, and active intellect,
was thus degraded far below the ordinary condition of the brute.

Thus eighteen months rolled away, and the poor boy became insane through
mental exhaustion and debility. But even then he retained a lively sense
of gratitude for every word or act of kindness. At one time, the inhuman
wretch who was endeavoring by slow torture to conduct this child to the
grave, seized h