“Great God!” he exclaimed, “you are just, and will this be suffered?”

He then thought of his parents, and the fiery mood of his mind changed to one of melancholy and sorrow.  He looked back upon his aged father’s enduring struggle—­upon the battle of the old man’s heart against the accursed vice which had swayed its impulses so long—­on the protracted conflict between the two energies, which, like contending fivmies in the field, had now left little but ruin and desolation behind them.  His heart, when he brought all these things near him, expanded, and like a bird, folded its wings about the gray-haired martyr to the love he bore him.  But his mother—­the caressing, the proud, the affectionate, whose heart, in the vivid tenderness of hope for her beloved boy, had shaped out his path in life, as that on which she could brood with the fondness of a loving and delighted spirit—­that mother’s image, and the idea of her sorrows prostrated his whole strength, like that of a stricken infant, to the earth.

“Mother, mother,” he exclaimed, “when I think of what you reared me for, and what I am this night, how can my heart do otherwise than break, as well on your account as on my own, and for all that love us!  Oh! what will become of you, my blessed mother?  Hard does it go with you that you’re not about your pride, as you used to call me, now that I’m in this trouble, in this fate that is soon to cut me down from your loving arms!  The thought of you is dear to my heart, dear, dearer, dearer than that of any—­than my own Una.  What will become of her, too, and the old man?  Oh, why, why is it that the death I am to suffer is to fall so heavily on them that love me best?”

He then returned to his bed, but the cold and dreary images of death and ruin haunted his imagination, until the night was far spent, when at length he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

By the sympathy expressed at his trial, our readers may easily conceive the profound sorrow which was felt for him, in the district where he was known, from the moment the knowledge of his sentence had gone abroad among the people.  This was much strengthened by that which, whether in man or woman, never fails to create an amiable prejudice in its favor—­I mean youth and personal beauty.  His whole previous character was now canvassed with a mournful lenity that brought out his virtues into beautiful relief; and the fate of the affectionate son was deplored no less than that of the youthful, but rash and inconsiderate lover.  Neither was the father without his share of compassion, for they could not forget that, despite of all his penury and extortion, the old man’s heart had been fixed, with a strong but uncouth affection, upon his amiable and only boy.  It was, however, when they thought of his mother, in whose heart of hearts he had been enshrined as the idol of her whole affection, that their spirits became truly touched.  Many a mother assumed in her own person, by the force