to 'Meriky. This fresh misfortune
will go nigh to kill her outright."

"And was it to add to this poor devoted creature's sorrows," I asked
myself, "that I was prepared to give false evidence against her son?"
For well I knew, that his life depended upon that evidence.

For Martin I felt no pity. His death never filled me with remorse like
the murder of the 'Squire. He was born for the gallows. I had only
forestalled him in the deed that would send him to the grave. He had
sought the spot with the intention to rob and kill. I had no doubts on
that head; and I persuaded myself that he had richly merited the fate
that awaited him. But the grief of his unhappy mother awakened a pang in
my breast that was not so easily assuaged.

The women at length took their leave, and I was alone with my mother.

For some minutes she remained silent, her hands pressed tightly over her
breast, and her tear-swollen eyes fixed mournfully on the ground.

"Noah," she said, at length, slowly raising her head, and looking me
earnestly in the face, "do you think that the family would allow me to
look at the corpse?"

I actually started with horror. I felt the blood recede from my cheeks,
and a cold chill creep from my hair downwards.

"Good God! Mother, what should make you wish to see him? He is a
frightful spectacle!--so frightful that I would not look at him again
for worlds!"

"Oh," groaned my mother, "it is hard to part from him for ever, without
one last look!"

"Mother, Mother!" I cried--while a horrid suspicion darted through, my
brain--"what is the meaning of this strange conduct, and still stranger
words? In the name of Heaven! what was Squire Carlos to you?"

"Noah, he was your father!" returned my mother, slowly and solemnly. "I
need not tell you what he was to me."

Had she stabbed me with a red-hot knife, the effect would have been less
painful.

"My father!" I cried, with a yell of agony, as I sank down, stunned with
horror, at her feet. "Mother!--Mother! for my sake--for your own sake,
recal those dreadful words!"

Some minutes elapsed before I again awoke to the consciousness of my
terrible guilt. My crime appeared to me in a new aspect--an aspect that
froze my soul, and iced the warm stream of my young blood with despair.
I had been excited--agitated--almost maddened, with the certainty of
being a murderer; but there was something of human passion in those
tumultuous feelings. But the certainty that I was not o