“Gentlemen, I, shall ask you to go with me away from this court room and its minions of the law, away from the scene of this tragedy, to a distant, I wish I could say a happier day.  The story I have to tell is of a lovely little girl, with sunny hair and laughing eyes, traveling with her parents, evidently people of wealth and refinement, upon a Mississippi steamboat.  There is an explosion, one of those terrible catastrophes which leave the imprint of an unsettled mind upon the survivors.  Hundreds of mangled remains are sent into eternity.  When the wreck is cleared away this sweet little girl is found among the panic stricken survivors in the midst of a scene of horror enough to turn the steadiest brain.  Her parents have disappeared.  Search even for their bodies is in vain.  The bewildered, stricken child—­who can say what changes the fearful event wrought in her tender brain—­clings to the first person who shows her sympathy.  It is Mrs. Hawkins, this good lady who is still her loving friend.  Laura is adopted into the Hawkins family.  Perhaps she forgets in time that she is not their child.  She is an orphan.  No, gentlemen, I will not deceive you, she is not an orphan.  Worse than that.  There comes another day of agony.  She knows that her father lives.  Who is he, where is he?  Alas, I cannot tell you.  Through the scenes of this painful history he flits here and there a lunatic!  If he, seeks his daughter, it is the purposeless search of a lunatic, as one who wanders bereft of reason, crying where is my child?  Laura seeks her father.  In vain just as she is about to find him, again and again-he disappears, he is gone, he vanishes.

“But this is only the prologue to the tragedy.  Bear with me while I relate it. (Mr. Braham takes out a handkerchief, unfolds it slowly; crashes it in his nervous hand, and throws it on the table).  Laura grew up in her humble southern home, a beautiful creature, the joy, of the house, the pride of the neighborhood, the loveliest flower in all the sunny south.  She might yet have been happy; she was happy.  But the destroyer came into this paradise.  He plucked the sweetest bud that grew there, and having enjoyed its odor, trampled it in the mire beneath his feet.  George Selby, the deceased, a handsome, accomplished Confederate Colonel, was this human fiend.  He deceived her with a mock marriage; after some months he brutally, abandoned her, and spurned her as if she were a contemptible thing; all the time he had a wife in New Orleans.  Laura was crushed.  For weeks, as I shall show you by the testimony of her adopted mother and brother, she hovered over death in delirium.  Gentlemen, did she ever emerge from this delirium?  I shall show you that when she recovered her health, her mind was changed, she was not what she had been.  You can judge yourselves whether the tottering reason ever recovered its throne.