een concluded.

The State's Attorney next produced certain letters, purporting to have
been written by Mr. Alden Lytton to Mrs. Mary Grey during the period of
his courtship.

These letters, he said, were important as corroborative evidence, and he
begged leave to read them to the jury.

He then commenced with the correspondence from the earliest date.

And there in open court he read aloud, one after the other, all those
fond, foolish, impassioned letters that the love-sick lad, Alden Lytton,
had written to the artful woman who had beguiled him in the earliest
days of their acquaintance, and before he had discovered her deep
depravity.

This was the severest ordeal Alden Lytton had to bear. For he knew he
had written these foolish letters in his romantic boyhood, and in his
manhood he felt heartily ashamed of them. Under _any_ circumstances he
would have been heartily ashamed of them. His ears tingled and his face
burned to hear them read aloud to judge, jury and gaping crowd.

And then and there he registered a vow never, never, never to write
another gushing love-letter so long as he should live in this world; no,
not even to his own dear wife.

When the last terrible letter was finished he felt as much relieved as
if he had been unbound from the rack.

But his relief was soon superseded by the utmost astonishment when Mr.
Martindale took up another parcel, saying:

"The letters that I have just read, your honor, and gentlemen of the
jury, were, as you have heard, written from the University of
Charlottesville some years ago. Those that I am about to read to you
were written from Wendover last year, in the few weeks preceding the
marriage of the prisoner with Mary Grey."

And so saying, the State's Attorney proceeded to read, one after the
other, all those forged letters which had been executed with inimitable
skill by Mary Grey herself and mailed from Wendover by her unconscious
confederate, Craven Kyte.

These counterfeits were even fonder, more foolish and more impassioned
than the real ones, and every letter pressed speedy marriage, until the
last one, which actually arranged the mode and manner of proceeding.

During the reading of the final letter Mr. Alden Lytton beckoned his
counsel, who approached him.

"I acknowledge the first batch of folly written from Charlottesville,
when I was a boy of eighteen or nineteen," said Alden, between a laugh
and a blush.

"Every man has been a boy, and a foo