We will not longer pain the reader’s feelings with details of this sad recognition, but inform him that the body was removed to Clotilda’s peaceful habitation, from whence, with becoming ceremony, it was buried on the following day.  A small marble tablet, standing in a sequestered churchyard near the outskirts of Nassau, and on which the traveller may read these simple words:—­“Franconia, my friend, lies here!” over which, in a circle, is chiseled the figure of an angel descending, and beneath, “How happy in Heaven are the Good!” marks the spot where her ashes rest in peace.

CHAPTER L.

In which A dangerous principle is illustrated.

Should the sagacious reader be disappointed in our hero Nicholas, who, instead of being represented as a model of disinterestedness, perilling his life to save others, sacrificing his own interests for the cause of liberty, and wasting on hardened mankind all those amiable qualities which belong only to angels, but with which heroes are generally invested for the happy purpose of pleasing the lover of romance, has evinced little else than an unbending will, he will find a palliation in that condition of life to which his oppressors have forced him to submit.  Had Nicholas enjoyed his liberty, many incidents of a purely disinterested character might have been recorded to his fame, for indeed he had noble traits.  That we have not put fiery words into his mouth, with which to execrate the tyrant, while invoking the vengeance of heaven-and, too, that we are guilty of the crime of thus suddenly transferring him from boyhood to manhood, nor have hanged him to please the envious and vicious,—­will find excuse with the indulgent reader, who will be kind enough to consider that it is our business to relate facts as they are, to the performance of which-unthankful though it may be-we have drawn from the abundance of material placed in our hand by the southern world.  We may misname characters and transpose scenes, but southern manners and customs we have transcribed from nature, to which stern book we have religiously adhered.  And, too (if the reader will pardon the digression), though we never have agreed with our very best admirers of the gallows, some of whom hold it a means of correcting morals-nor, are yet ready to yield assent to the opinions of the many, so popularly laid down in favour of what we consider a medium of very unwholesome influence, we readily admit the existence of many persons who have well merited a very good hanging.  But, were the same rules of evidence admissible in a court of law when a thief is on trial, applied against the practice of “publicly hanging,” there would be little difficulty in convicting it of inciting to crime.  Not only does the problem of complex philosophy-the reader may make the philosophy to suit his taste-presented in the contrariety of scenes on and about the gallows