instance I invite your attention. A devoted Scotch father
finding that his own child had contracted an unfortunate attachment to
a man of notoriously bad character, interdicted all communication, and
locked his daughter into a tenement room; the adjoining apartment (with
only a thin partition wall between) being occupied by a neighbor, who
overheard the angry altercation that ensued. He recognized the voices
of father and daughter, and the words 'barbarity,' 'cruelty, 'death,'
were repeatedly heard. The father at last left the room, locking his
child in as a prisoner. After a time, strange noises were heard by the
tenant of the adjoining chamber; suspicion was aroused, a bailiff was
summoned, the door forced open, and there lay the dying girl weltering
in blood, with the fatal knife lying near. She was asked if her father
had caused her sad condition, and she made an affirmative gesture and
expired. At that moment the father returned, and stood stupefied with
horror, which was interpreted as a consciousness of guilt; and this was
corroborated by the fact that his shirt sleeve was sprinkled with
blood. In vain he asserted his innocence, and showed that the blood
stains were the result of a bandage having become untied where he had
bled himself a few days before. The words and groans overheard, the
blood, the affirmation of the dying woman, every damning circumstance
constrained the jury to convict him of the murder. He was hung in
chains, and his body left swinging from the gibbet. The new tenant, who
subsequently rented the room, was ransacking the chamber in which the
girl died, when, in a cavity of the chimney where it had fallen
unnoticed, was found a paper written by this girl, declaring her
intention to commit suicide, and closing with the words: 'My inhuman
father is the cause of my death'; thus explaining her dying gestures.
On examination of this document by the friends and relatives of the
girl, it was recognized and identified as her handwriting; and it
established the fact that the father had died innocent of every crime,
except that of trying to save his child from a degrading marriage.

"Now, mark the prompt and satisfactory reparation decreed by justice,
and carried out by the officers of the law. The shrivelled, dishonored
body was lowered from the gibbet, given to his relatives for decent
burial, and the magistrates who sentenced him, ordered a flag waved
over his grave, as compensation for all his wrongs