es than
mine!'

'This man died no natural or easy death,' said the surgeon. 'I _must_
see the body!' With a motion so sudden, that the woman hardly knew that
he had slipped from beside her, he tore open the curtain, admitted the
full light of day, and returned to the bedside.

'There has been violence here,' he said, pointing towards the body, and
gazing intently on the face, from which the black veil was now, for the
first time, removed. In the excitement of a minute before, the female
had thrown off the bonnet and veil, and now stood with her eyes fixed
upon him. Her features were those of a woman about fifty, who had once
been handsome. Sorrow and weeping had left traces upon them which not
time itself would ever have produced without their aid; her face was
deadly pale; and there was a nervous contortion of the lip, and an
unnatural fire in her eye, which showed too plainly that her bodily and
mental powers had nearly sunk, beneath an accumulation of misery.

'There has been violence here,' said the surgeon, preserving his
searching glance.

'There has!' replied the woman.

'This man has been murdered.'

'That I call God to witness he has,' said the woman, passionately;
'pitilessly, inhumanly murdered!'

'By whom?' said the surgeon, seizing the woman by the arm.

'Look at the butchers' marks, and then ask me!' she replied.

The surgeon turned his face towards the bed, and bent over the body which
now lay full in the light of the window. The throat was swollen, and a
livid mark encircled it. The truth flashed suddenly upon him.

'This is one of the men who were hanged this morning!' he exclaimed,
turning away with a shudder.

'It is,' replied the woman, with a cold, unmeaning stare.

'Who was he?' inquired the surgeon.

'_My son_,' rejoined the woman; and fell senseless at his feet.

It was true. A companion, equally guilty with himself, had been
acquitted for want of evidence; and this man had been left for death, and
executed. To recount the circumstances of the case, at this distant
period, must be unnecessary, and might give pain to some persons still
alive. The history was an every-day one. The mother was a widow without
friends or money, and had denied herself necessaries to bestow them on
her orphan boy. That boy, unmindful of her prayers, and forgetful of the
sufferings she had endured for him--incessant anxiety of mind, and
voluntary starvation of body--had plunged into a career