ored her with the passion he had lavished on the dead. It
seemed as if the shade of Eleanora was perpetually prompting him to
bestow all his affection on the young and beautiful Eliza. She caressed
his children with the pride of an aunt, she traced the image of her
sister in the laughing eyes of the merry babes--still she was not happy.
How could she be happy? She loved him as a man--as a brother. She was
a Christian--he an Infidel. She was bound by creeds--he by conduct. She
was doing the duty she owed to the dead. He sought to do it by uniting
himself to the living. Eliza was anxious to marry, but there existed
something which, to her mind, was greater than human duties, and it
often outraged them. God and the Church demanded her first attention,
and then her lover and his children. The Church, in cruel mockery of
human rights, stepped between her judgment and her affections. It denied
the power of a woman to occupy the married home of her deceased sister.
She was willing to pledge her love to Charles Blount at the altar, but
the priest mocked her prayers and denounced her affections. The occasion
was too good to be lost. Episcopalism sought revenge on its opponent,
and it triumphed. Eliza felt the force of Blount's arguments. She
wandered with him through the green fields, but her sorrow was too
great to pluck the wild roses. The luscious fruits of summer were
passed untasted. A heart sick and in trouble, a mind wandering from her
sister's grave to her children, and then at the anathema of the Church,
made her a widowed maid. To overcome her scruples, her lover wrote a
book (inviting the clergy to refute it,) defending the marriage with a
deceased wife's sister. But ever as he spoke there was a film before her
eyes. There was a gaunt priest, with canonical robes, stood before the
gates of heaven. Before him and through him was the way to an eternal
happiness, below him was a fiery hell; and he shouted with hoarse voice,
_Incest, incest, incest!_--And ever as he shouted, he pointed with his
finger of scorn at this Christian hell, and she conjured up in her mind
the old stories of this priest, until she saw the livid flames rising up
higher till they encircled her form, and then the priest screamed with
fury, _Anathema maranatha, incest, incest!_ And in terror she stood,
with the big drops of sweat dripping from her brow, with her heart
beating, with her mind distracted, but her affections unclouded.

This priest was th