painful to follow the sad moods of a noble mind, conscious of
its aberrations, and yet unable to control them. We have not the
power of analysis capable of tracing it through all its windings, and
exhibiting it naked to the view, and if we had, might shrink from the
task, as from one inflicting unnecessary pain, both on the writer
and the reader. It is our object only so far to sketch the state of
Armstrong's mind, as to make his conduct intelligible.

His restlessness has been alluded to. He found himself unable to sleep
as formerly. Long after retiring to rest he would lie wide awake,
vainly courting the gentle influence that seemed to shun him the more
it was wooed. The rays of the morning sun would sometimes stream into
the window before sleep had visited his eyelids, and he would rise
haggard, and weary, and desponding. And if he did sink into slumber,
it was not always into forgetfulness, but into a confused mist of
dreams, more harassing than even his waking thoughts. The difficulty
of obtaining sleep had lately induced a habit of reading late into the
night, and not unfrequently even into the morning hours. Long after
his daughter had sought her chamber, and when she supposed he was
in bed, he was seated in his solitary room, trying to fasten his
attention on a book, and to produce the condition favorable to repose.
The darkness of his mind sought congenial gloom. If he opened
the sacred volume, he turned not to the gracious promises of
reconciliation and pardon, and the softened theology of the New
Testament, or to those visions of a future state of beatitude, which
occasionally light up the sombre pages of the Old, as if the gates of
Paradise were for a moment opened, to let out a radiance on a darkness
that would else be too disheartening and distracting; but to the
wailings of the prophets and denunciations of punishment. These he
fastened on with a fatal tenacity, and by a perverted ingenuity, in
some way or other connected with himself, and made applicable to
his own circumstances. Naught could pass through his imagination or
memory, but, by some diabolical alchemy, was stripped of its sanative
and healthful properties, and converted into harm.

"Young's Night Thoughts" was a book that possessed peculiar
attractions. For hours would he hang over its distressful pages, and
many were the leaves blotted by his tears. Yet those tears relieved
him not. Still, from time to time, would he recur to the book, as