r the last act of parting, fly to the country, to be
as far as possible from the scene of the impending tragedy. I was the first
who communicated the tidings of the condition of their son; and the noise
in the prisoner's cell, as the men still continued their operations, was a
sad commentary on my words. The sister, who was veiled, uttered a shrill
scream, and fell back on the floor. The father stood like

"Wo's bleak, voiceless petrifaction,"

moving neither limb nor countenance; his eye was fixed steadfastly on the
ground, and a deadly paleness was over his face. The mother, who was also
veiled, staggered to a bench--recovering herself suddenly, as some thought,
rising wildly, stung her to a broken utterance of some words. I approached
her, while Mr H----, the chaplain, was assisting in getting Miss D---- to a
chair.

"Let him die!--let him die!" she exclaimed. "Is not his doom inevitable?
You will torture my Eugene by keeping in his life till the law demands its
victim, and he may be carried--carried! O God!--to a second death, ten
times more cruel than that which he is now suffering."

"No rejection of the petition has been intimated," I replied; "and there is
hope to the last grain in life's ebbing glass. It is not yet two years
since a reprieve came to a prisoner, in this very jail, within three hours
of the appointed term of his life. You have spoken from the impulse of an
agony which has overcome the truer feelings of a mother and the better
dictates of prudence."

"Small, small, indeed, is that hope which a mother may not see through the
gloom of a despair such as mine," she replied. "But what means that
dreadful noise in Eugene's cell?"

"Only the efforts of the men to keep him awake," replied I. "My duty
requires my efforts in behalf of a fellow-creature to the last moment.
Reflect for an instant, and the proper feeling will again vindicate its
place in the heart of a parent."

"Dreadful alternative!" she replied. "But, sir, hear me. I am his mother,
and I tell you, from the divination of a mother's heart, that there will
now be no respite. I say it again; it would be a relief to me if I heard,
at this moment, that he had escaped by death that tragedy which will now be
rendered a thousand times more painful to him and dreadful to me."

The father moved his eyes, and fixed them on the face of the mother of his
boy, who, in her agony, thus called for his death in a form which bore even
a shade of re