the movements of this woman watched, she was
nowhere to be found. The servants had seen a handsome and richly dressed
lady pass through the front door, and walk swiftly toward the highway.
The chambermaid could not have passed without being observed. Yet no
human being ever saw her afterward.

* * * * *

The day on which General Harrington was buried, the funeral procession
passed by the house in which Lina had lived during her painful sojourn
in the city. As it went by, a woman rushed to and fro in the house,
uttering the most piteous cries, and tearing at everything within her
reach. From that little fairy-like conservatory she had torn down the
blossoming vines, and broken the plants, crowning herself fantastically
with the trailing garlands, and trampling the blossoms beneath her feet
with bursts of wild laughter, alternated with groans, that seemed to
rend her heart asunder. As the funeral cortege went by, these groans and
shrieks of laughter aroused the neighborhood. Some members of the police
entered, and took the maniac away.

* * * * *

It was a year after General Harrington's death, a steamer was passing
through a channel of the East River, leaving Blackwell's Island on the
left. Sitting upon the deck was a bridal party: that morning had made
Lina, Ralph Harrington's wife. James Harrington had given her away,
having first richly endowed the young couple, and Mabel made one of the
wedding party.

Upon the shore near the end of Blackwell's Island, stands that most
painful appendage to a lunatic asylum, the mad-house; looming over the
water like a huge menagerie, in which wild animals are kept. Through the
iron lattices, which gird in the granite walls of this building, you may
at any time see the maniacs roaming to and fro, sometimes in sullen
silence, sometimes shrieking out their fantasies or their rage to the
winds as they whistle by, and the waters that flow on forever and ever,
unconscious of the miserable secrets given to their keeping.

As the boat containing the bridal party swept by the mad-house a
beautiful but most fiendish face looked out between these bars; a
clenched hand was thrust through, and a storm of terrible curses hailed
after Mabel and her newly married children. But the boat swept calmly
by, leaving them behind. Mabel saw the clenched hand, but the curses
rushed by her in one confused wail, which touched her only with gen