generation
there had been no stain on our good name. It would be death to my
father, and disgrace to all my family, if I owned what I had done, and
suffered for it on the public scaffold. I prayed to be guided; and I had
a revelation, toward morning, of what to do.

"I was commanded, in a vision, to open the Bible, and vow on it to set
my guilty self apart among my innocent fellow-creatures from that day
forth; to live among them a separate and silent life, to dedicate the
use of my speech to the language of prayer only, offered up in the
solitude of my own chamber when no human ear could hear me. Alone, in
the morning, I saw the vision, and vowed the vow. No human ear _has_
heard me from that time. No human ear _will_ hear me, to the day of my
death.

"Thursday.--The people came to speak to me, as usual. They found me
dumb.

"What had happened to me in the past, when my head had been hurt, and my
speech affected by it, gave a likelier look to my dumbness than it might
have borne in the case of another person. They took me back again to the
hospital. The doctors were divided in opinion. Some said the shock
of what had taken place in the house, coming on the back of the other
shock, might, for all they knew, have done the mischief. And others
said, 'She got her speech again after the accident; there has been no
new injury since that time; the woman is shamming dumb, for some purpose
of her own.' I let them dispute it as they liked. All human talk was
nothing now to me. I had set myself apart among my fellow-creatures; I
had begun my separate and silent life.

"Through all this time the sense of a coming punishment hanging over
me never left my mind. I had nothing to dread from human justice. The
judgment of an Avenging Providence--there was what I was waiting for.

"Friday--They held the inquest. He had been known for years past as an
inveterate drunkard, he had been seen overnight going home in liquor; he
had been found locked up in his room, with the key inside the door, and
the latch of the window bolted also. No fire-place was in this garret;
nothing was disturbed or altered: nobody by human possibility could have
got in. The doctor reported that he had died of congestion of the lungs;
and the jury gave their verdict accordingly."

12.

"Saturday.--Marked forever in my calendar as the memorable day on which
the judgment descended on me. Toward three o'clock in the afternoon--in
the broad sunlight, under the