“sublime
  Her dark despair and plead for its one crime.”

It was probably on a discovery of this feeling in the girl that the intermeddling sister-in-law founded her charge against the master.

But there is a point beyond which human endurance cannot go,—­at which milder natures turn to voluntary death as a refuge from further suffering, and fiercer ones begin to contemplate crime with savage complacency.  Towards this point the ruthless and persevering cruelty of these two women was now rapidly driving their wretched victim, and soon, very soon, they were to learn that they had been hunting, not a lamb, but a tigress, whose single spring, when brought to bay, would be as quick, as sure, and as deadly as was ever made from an Indian jungle.  For now, near the end of the third year of Captain Wilde’s married life, its wretched scenes of discord and tyranny were about to be closed in a catastrophe that was to overwhelm a great community with consternation and horror, and blot an entire family out of existence almost in a single night,—­a catastrophe in which Providence, true to that ideal of perfect justice called poetical, working out the punishment of two of the actors by means of their own inhumanity, at the same time mysteriously involved two others,—­one clothed in all the innocence of infancy, and the other guilty only through weakness and as the instrument of another.  Seldom has destruction been more sudden or more complete, and never, perhaps, was so annihilating a blow dealt by so weak a hand.

Those who remember the early times of Kentucky know that the place of the agricultural and mechanics’ fairs of the present day was supplied by “big meetings,” which, under the various names of associations, camp-meetings, and basket-meetings, continued in full popularity to a quite recent period, and were at last partially suppressed on account of the immorality which they occasioned and encouraged.  It was to these holy fairs—­as now to secular ones—­that the wealth and fashion of early Kentucky crowded for the purpose of displaying themselves most conspicuously before the eyes of assembled counties.  Mrs. Wilde, like most women of her temper, was passionately fond of such public triumphs, and had determined, at a camp-meeting soon to be held in the vicinity, to outshine all her rural neighbors in splendor.  For the full realization of this ambition, a new carriage was, in her opinion, absolutely necessary.  This fact she communicated to her husband, and upon some demur on his part, a thing now very rare, her temper, as usual, broke forth in a storm of reproach and abuse, so that the poor man, completely subdued, was glad to purchase peace by acquiescence in what his judgment regarded as a foolish expense; and he prepared immediately to set off for L——­ to procure the coveted vehicle.  But before he had mounted, his wife, yet hot from their recent altercation, discovered