ive her. A few minutes
before her death, she desired the cripple to approach her bedside. She
fixed her closing eyes, which affection had never lighted, upon his. She
informed him that he was not her son.

"Oh, tell me, then, whose son I am! Who are my parents?" he exclaimed,
eagerly. "Speak! speak!"

"Your parents!" she muttered; and remorse and ignorance held her
departing soul in their grasp. She struggled; she again continued: "Your
parents! no, Ebenezer, no! I dare not name them! I have sworn--I have
sworn! and a death-bed is no time to break an oath!"

"Speak! speak! Tell me, as you hope for heaven!" cried the cripple, with
his thin, bony fingers grasping the wrists of the dying woman.

"Monster! monster!" she screamed, wildly, and in terror, "leave
me--leave me! You are provided for--open that chest--the chest--the
chest!"

Ebenezer loosed his grasp; he sprang towards a strong chest which stood
in the room. "The keys! the keys!" he exclaimed, wildly; and again
hurrying to the bed, he violently pulled a bunch of keys from beneath
her pillow. But while he applied them to the chest, the herald of death
rattled in the throat of its victim; and, with one agonising throe and a
deep groan, her spirit escaped, and her body lay a corpse upon the bed.

He opened the chest, and in it he found securities, which settled upon
him, under the name of Ebenezer Baird, five thousand pounds. But there
was nothing which threw light on his parentage--nothing to inform who he
was, or why he was there.

The body of her who had never shed a tear over him he accompanied to the
grave. But now a deeper gloom fell upon him. He met but few men, and the
few he met shunned him, for there was a wildness and a bitterness in his
words--a railing against the world--which they wished not to hear. He
fancied, too, that they despised him--that their eyes were ever
examining the form of his deformities; and he returned their glance with
a scowl, and their words with the accents of hatred. Even as he passed
the solitary farmhouse, the younger children fled in terror, and the
elder laughed, or pointed towards him the finger of curiosity. All these
things fell upon the heart of the cripple, and turned the human kindness
of his bosom into gall. His companions became the solitude of the
mountains, and the silence of the woods. They heard his bitter
soliloquies without reviling him, or echo answered him in tones of
sympathy more mournful than his own