But I kep a-thinkin’ to myself, “Oh, that poor little creeter!  Oh, them poor, poor creeters that loved her!  Oh, that poor mother!” And then anon I would say to myself, “Oh, what if it wuz my Tirzah Ann!  What if it wuz the Babe!  Oh, that villian; may the Lord punish him!”

And that is jest the way I sot, and wept, and cried, and cried and wept.

You see, the way it wuz, there wuz a sweet little girl, only ten years old, decoyed by a lyin’ excuse from her warm, cosey home at midnight by a villian, and took through the snowy, icy streets to her doom.

Her little cold body wuz found in an empty old barn, and her destroyer, her murderer, had fled.  But men wuz on his tracts, the hull country wuz roused, and they wuz huntin’ him down, as if he wuz a wild animal, as indeed he wuz.

But anon, as I read the paper over again, I see these words—­“The man was intoxicated.”

And then I begun to weep on the other end of my handkerchief (metafor).

And then, when other accounts come out, and the man wuz ketched, he swore, and swore solemn, too, that he did not remember one single solitary thing after he left that saloon where he got his drink till he sobered up and found himself by the side of that little dead body.

And other witnesses swore that they see him drunk as a fool before he sot out on his murderous and worse than murderous assault.

But from the time of the first tidings that come of the deed that had been done—­though the excitement wuz more rampant that I ever knew it to be, and every single man in the community wuz out bloodthirsty for his death, and every party a-carry-in’ a rope to hang him, and every woman a-lookin’ out eager to see him hung, and all on ’em a-cursin’ him, and a-weepin’ over what he had done—­

Durin’ all this time, not one word did I hear uttered agin the cause of his crime, agin the man who sold him what made him a murderer, and worse, or the man that supplied the saloon with this damnable liquid.

No, not a single word did I hear from a Jonesvillian, male or female.  And not one word from my pardner, though his excitement wuz so extreme that that night, jest about dusk, he rushed out thinkin’ that he had got the murderer, and throwed the rope round Deacon Sypher, who had come over to borrow an auger.  And once in a similer way he ketched Old Bobbet, his excitement and zeal wuz so rampant and intense.

[Illustration:  He rushed out and throwed the rope around Deacon Sypher.]

Them old men wuz mad as hens, and cause enough they had, though they forgive him when they see what a state he wuz in, and they jest about as bad themselves.

But not a word from them, nor from any one did I hear durin’ the hull time the excitement rained—­and oh! how it did rain—­about the cause of the crime.

Not one man waded in and dived down into the deep undercurrent of causes, that strange deep that underlays all human actions.