orment her own mind, without enabling her
to arrive at any satisfactory conclusion as to Donnel's positive guilt,
arising from the mysterious incidents in question. A kind of awakened
conscience, too, resulting not from any principle of true repentance,
but from superstitious alarm and a conviction that the Prophet had
communicated to Sarah a certain secret connected with her, which she
dreaded so much to have known, had for some time past rendered her whole
life a singular compound of weak terror, ill-temper, gloom, and a kind
of conditional repentance, which depended altogether upon the fact of
her secret being known. In this mood it was that she left the cabin as
we have described.

"I'm not fit to die," she said to herself, after she had gone--"an'
that's the second offer for my life she has made. Any way, it's the best
of my play to lave them; an' above all, to keep away from her. That's
the second attempt; and I know to a certainty, that if she makes a third
one, it'll do for me. Oh, no doubt of that--the third time's always the
charm!--an' into my heart that unlucky knife 'ill go, if she ever tries
it a third time! They tell me," she proceeded, soliloquizing, as she was
in the habit of doing, "that the inquest is to be held in a day or two,
an' that the crowner was only unwell a trifle, and hadn't the sickness
afther all. No matther--not all the wather in the sky 'ud clear my mind
that there's not villany joined with that Tobaccy-box, though where it
could go, or what could come of it (barrin' the devil himself or the
fairies tuck it,) I don't know."

So far as concerned the coroner, the rumor of his having caught the
prevailing typhus was not founded on fact. A short indisposition,
arising from a cold caught by a severe wetting, but by no means of a
serious or alarming nature, was his only malady; and when the day to
which the inquest had been postponed had arrived, he was sufficiently
recovered to conduct that important investigation. A very large
crowd was assembled upon the occasion, and a deep interest prevailed
throughout that part of the country. The circumstances, however, did
not, as it happened, admit of any particular difficulty Jerry Sullivan
and his friends attended as, was their duty, in order to give evidence
touching the identity of the body. This, however, was a matter of
peculiar difficulty. On disinterring the remains, it was found that the
clothes worn at the time of the murder had not been b