“It is my Christian duty as a neighbor; and I was always very fond of the first Mrs. Darrington, Helena Tracey.  What is this wicked world coming to?  Robbery and murder stalking bare-faced through the land.  It will be a dreadful blow to Mitchell, because he and Luke Darrington have been intimate all their lives.  I see the carriage coming round, so I must get my bonnet and wrap.”

“I presume Mr. Dunbar is engaged in the same melancholy details which occupy my uncle.”

“Doubtless he is, because his father was General Darrington’s attorney until his health failed; and Lennox is now his lawyer and business agent.  It is a thousand pities that Prince is away in Europe.”

Two hours after the carriage had disappeared on the road leading to Elm Bluff, Leo crossed the grassy lawn, and sat down near the gate, on a rustic bench under a cluster of tall lilacs, which gave their name to her uncle’s home.

A keen north wind whistling through neighboring walnut tree tops, drove the dying leaves like frightened flocks before it, and ever and anon the ripened nuts pattered down, hiding themselves under the drift of yellow foliage, that had sheltered them in cool greenery during summer heats.  Overhead a red squirrel barked and frisked, and across the pale-blue sky, feathered nomads, teal or mallard, moved swiftly en echelon, their quivering pinions flashing like silver, as they fled southward.  On a distant hillside cattle browsed, and sheep wandered; and the drowsy tinkle of bells, as the herd wended homeward, seemed a nocturne of rest, for the closing day.

How serene, harmonious and holy all nature appeared; and yet a few miles distant, into what a fierce seething whirlpool of conflicting passions, of hatred and bloodthirsty vengeance, had human crime plunged an entire community.  We plume ourselves upon nineteenth century civilization, upon ethical advancement, upon Christian progress; we adorn our cathedrals, build temples for art treasures, and museums for science, and listen to preludes of the “music of the future;” and we shudder at the mention of vice, as at the remembrance of the tortures of Regulus, but will the Cain type ever become extinct, like the dodo, or the ichthyosaurus?  When will the laws of heredity, and the by-laws of agnation result in an altruism, where human bloodshed is an unknown horror?

The apostles of Evolution tell us, that in the genealogical ages during which man has struggled upward, from the lower stages of vertebrate and mammal to the genus of catarrhine apes, he has gradually thrown off bestial instincts, and that the tiger taint will ultimately be totally eliminated; that “original sin is neither more nor less than the brute inheritance which every man carries with him, and that Evolution is an advance toward true salvation.”  Meanwhile what becomes of the “Survival of the Fittest”, which is only a euphemism for the strangling of the feeble by the strong?  We can understand how perfection, or permanence of type, individual and national, demands carnage, and entails all the dire catalogue of human woes, but wherein is altruism evolved?  How many aeons shall we wait, to behold the leopard and the lamb pasturing together in peace?