ecorded in the malefactor's journal, was illumined and exposed by a
light which exhibited not only the workings of the design itself, but
the reason which led to its perpetration. This man had married the
confiding and devoted foreigner for the sake of her immense wealth,
which raised him in an instant from mediocrity to magnificence; and,
having attained the object of his ambition, he had resolved--with a view
to the concealment of the means whereby he effected his purpose, and
regardless of the sacred obligation of gratitude he owed to her who had
left her country, her relations, and friends, to trust herself to his
protection and love--to immolate the faithful, kind-hearted, and
affectionate creature, by a cruel and protracted murder. In her own
country the cowardly wretch could not have braved the vengeance of her
countrymen; but, in a distant land, where few might be expected to stand
up for the rights of the injured foreigner, he had thought he might
execute his scheme with secrecy and success. But now it was discovered!
By one of those extraordinary detached traces of the finger of the
Almighty, exposed to the convicting power of divine intellect, it was
discovered!

The great excitement produced in my mind by this miraculous discovery
prevented me for some time from calmly deliberating on the steps I ought
to pursue, with the view of saving the poor foreigner from the designs
of her murderer. The picture of the devoted being lying, like a queen,
in the midst of the wealth she had brought to her husband, and trembling
at the very thought of rejecting his poison, for fear of giving him the
slightest pain--yet on the very point of being sacrificed; her wealth,
love, confidence, and gentleness, repaid by death, and her body
consigned, unlamented by friends--who might never hear of her fate--to
foreign dust, rose continually on my imagination, and interested my
feelings to a degree incompatible with the exercise of a calm judgment.
In proportion as my emotion subsided, the difficulty of my situation
appeared to increase. I was, apparently, the only person who knew
anything of this extraordinary purpose, and I saw the imprudence of
taking upon myself the total responsibility of a report to the public
authorities in a case where the chances of conviction would be
diminished to nothing by the determination of the victim to save her
destroyer, whom she never would believe guilty, and by the want of
evidence of a direct n