delusion of vindication by
blood, when he will learn a manly fortitude under calamity, a generous
trust in those above him, and, better again, a freeman's consciousness
that the law will vindicate him against injury, and that we live in
an age when the great are powerless to do wrong, unless when their
inhumanity be screened behind the darker shadow of the murder that
avenges it! Then, indeed, we have no sympathy for all the sufferings of
want, or all the miseries of fever; then, we forget the dreary hovel,
the famished children, the palsy of age, and the hopeless cry of
starving infancy,--we have neither eyes nor ears but for the sights and
sounds of murder!

We have said that amidst all the frequency of crime there is no country
of Europe where any case of guilt accompanied by new agencies or
attended by any unusual circumstances is sure to excite so great and
widespread interest. The very fact of an accusation involving any one in
rank above the starving cottier is looked upon as almost incredible,
and far from feeling sensibility dulled by the ordinary recurrence of
bloodshed, the crime becomes associated in our minds with but one class,
and as originating in one theme.

We have gradually been led away by these thoughts from the remark which
first suggested them, and now we turn again to the fact, that the city
of Kilkenny became a scene of the most intense anxiety as the morning
of that eventful trial dawned. Visitors poured in from the neighboring
counties, and even from Dublin. The case had been widely commented on
by the press; and although with every reserve as regarded the accused, a
most painful impression against old Mr. Dalton had spread on all sides.
Most of his own contemporaries had died; of the few who remained,
they were very old men, fast sinking into imbecility, and only vaguely
recollecting "Wild Peter" as one who would have stopped at nothing. The
new generation, then, received the impressions of the man thus unjustly;
nor were their opinions more lenient that they lived in an age which no
longer tolerated the excesses of the one that preceded it. Gossip, too,
had circulated its innumerable incidents on all the personages of this
strange drama; and from the venerable Count Stephen down to the informer
Meekins, every character was now before the world.

That the Daltons had come hundreds of miles, and had offered immense
sums of money to suppress the exposure, was among the commonest rumors
of t