“P.S.—­Willard Marsh, on this the fatal fifteenth day of July I hand you this manuscript, to be opened and read under the conditions agreed upon, and at the place which I designated.  I forego my intention to keep it on my body to explain the manner of my death, which is not important.  It will serve to explain the manner of yours.  I am to call for you during the night to receive assurance that you have read the manuscript.  You know me well enough to expect me.  But, my friend, it will be after twelve o’clock. May God have mercy on our souls!

  “J.R.C.”

Before the man who was reading this manuscript had finished, the candle had been picked up and lighted.  When the reader had done, he quietly thrust the paper against the flame and despite the protestations of the others held it until it was burnt to ashes.  The man who did this, and who afterward placidly endured a severe reprimand from the coroner, was a son-in-law of the late Charles Breede.  At the inquest nothing could elicit an intelligent account of what the paper had contained.

FROM “THE TIMES”

“Yesterday the Commissioners of Lunacy committed to the asylum Mr. James R. Colston, a writer of some local reputation, connected with the Messenger.  It will be remembered that on the evening of the 15th inst.  Mr. Colston was given into custody by one of his fellow-lodgers in the Baine House, who had observed him acting very suspiciously, baring his throat and whetting a razor—­occasionally trying its edge by actually cutting through the skin of his arm, etc.  On being handed over to the police, the unfortunate man made a desperate resistance, and has ever since been so violent that it has been necessary to keep him in a strait-jacket.  Most of our esteemed contemporary’s other writers are still at large.”

THE BOARDED WINDOW

In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest.  The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier—­restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which to-day we should call indigence than impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had voluntarily renounced.  Many of them had already forsaken that region for the remoter settlements, but among those remaining was one who had been of those first arriving.  He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence he seemed a part, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a needless word.  His simple wants were supplied by the sale or barter of skins of wild animals in the river town, for not a thing did he grow