he hurricane of affliction now too probably at hand. She
answered my appeal with the fervour I expected from what I had already
known of her character. She was a woman of a strong, fiery, perhaps I
might say of heroic mind, supported by a courage that was absolutely
indomitable, and by a strength of bodily frame very unusual in a woman,
and beyond the promise even of her person. She had suffered as deep a
wrench in her own affections as a human being can suffer; she had lost
her one sole child, a fair-haired boy of most striking beauty and
interesting disposition, at the age of seventeen, and by the worst of
all possible fates; he lived (as we did at that time) in a large
commercial city overflowing with profligacy, and with temptations of
every order; he had been led astray; culpable he had been, but by very
much the least culpable of the set into which accident had thrown him,
as regarded acts and probable intentions; and as regarded palliations
from childish years, from total inexperience, or any other alleviating
circumstances that could be urged, having everything to plead--and of
all his accomplices the only one who had anything to plead. Interest,
however, he had little or none; and whilst some hoary villains of the
party, who happened to be more powerfully befriended, were finally
allowed to escape with a punishment little more than nominal, he and two
others were selected as sacrifices to the offended laws. They suffered
capitally. All three behaved well; but the poor boy in particular, with
a courage, a resignation, and a meekness, so distinguished and beyond
his years as to attract the admiration and the liveliest sympathy of the
public universally. If strangers could feel in that way, if the mere
hardened executioner could be melted at the final scene,--it may be
judged to what a fierce and terrific height would ascend the affliction
of a doating mother, constitutionally too fervid in her affections. I
have heard an official person declare, that the spectacle of her
desolation and frantic anguish was the most frightful thing he had ever
witnessed, and so harrowing to the feelings, that all who could by
their rank venture upon such an irregularity, absented themselves during
the critical period from the office which corresponded with the
government; for, as I have said, the affair took place in a large
provincial city, at a great distance from the capital. All who knew this
woman, or who were witnesses to the a