long, and the outlaw himself,
a moment after, seemed conscious of its injustice.

"I do you wrong, Dillon; but on this subject I will have no one speak. I
can not be the man you would have me; I have been schooled otherwise. My
mother has taught me a different lesson; her teachings have doomed me,
and these enjoyments are now all beyond my hope."

"Your mother?" was the response of Dillon, in unaffected astonishment.

"Ay, man--my mother! Is there anything wonderful in that? She taught me
the love of evil with her milk--she sang it in lullabies over my
cradle--she gave it me in the playthings of my boyhood; her schoolings
have made me the morbid, the fierce criminal, the wilful, vexing spirit,
from whose association all the gentler virtues must always desire to
fly. If, in the doom which may finish my life of doom, I have any one
person to accuse of all, that person is--my mother!"

"Is this possible? Can it be true? It is strange--very strange!"

"It is not strange; we see it every day--in almost every family. She,
did not _tell_ me to lie, or to swindle, or to stab--no! oh, no! she
would have told me that all these things were bad; but she _taught_ me
to perform them all. She roused my passions, and not my _principles_,
into activity. She provoked the one, and suppressed the other. Did my
father reprove my improprieties, she petted me, and denounced him. She
crossed his better purposes, and defeated all his designs, until, at
last, she made my passions too strong for my government, not less than
hers; and left me, knowing the true, yet the victim of the false. Thus
it was that, while my intellect, in its calmer hours, taught me that
virtue is the only source of true felicity, my ungovernable passions set
the otherwise sovereign reason at defiance, and trampled it under foot.
Yes, in that last hour of eternal retribution, if called upon to
denounce or to accuse, I can point but to one as the author of all--the
weakly-fond, misjudging, misguiding woman who gave me birth!

"Within the last hour I have been thinking over all these things. I have
been thinking how I had been cursed in childhood by one who surely loved
me beyond all other things besides. I can remember how sedulously she
encouraged and prompted my infant passions, uncontrolled by her
authority and reason, and since utterly unrestrainable by my own. How
she stimulated me to artifices, and set me the example herself, by
frequently deceiving my father, an