lteration which one fortnight had
wrought in her person as well as her demeanour, fancied it impossible
that she could continue to live; or that, if she did, it must be through
the giving way of her reason. They proved, however, to be mistaken; or,
at least, if (as some thought) her reason did suffer in some degree,
this result showed itself in the inequality of her temper, in moody fits
of abstraction, and the morbid energy of her manner at times under the
absence of all adequate external excitement, rather than in any positive
and apparent hallucinations of thought. The charm which had mainly
carried off the instant danger to her faculties, was doubtless the
intense sympathy which she met with. And in these offices of consolation
my wife stood foremost. For, and that was fortunate, she had found
herself able, without violence to her own sincerest opinions in the
case, to offer precisely that form of sympathy which was most soothing
to the angry irritation of the poor mother; not only had she shown a
_direct_ interest in the boy, and not a mere interest of _reflection_
from that which she took in the mother, and had expressed it by visits
to his dungeon, and by every sort of attention to his comforts which his
case called for, or the prison regulations allowed; not only had she
wept with the distracted woman as if for a brother of her own; but,
which went farther than all the rest in softening the mother's heart,
she had loudly and indignantly proclaimed her belief in the boy's
innocence, and in the same tone her sense of the crying injustice
committed as to the selection of the victims, and the proportion of the
punishment awarded. Others, in the language of a great poet,

'Had pitied _her_ and not her grief;'

they had either not been able to see, or, from carelessness, had neglected
to see, any peculiar wrong done to her in the matter which occasioned her
grief,--but had simply felt compassion for her as for one summoned, in a
regular course of providential and human dispensation, to face an
affliction, heavy in itself, but not heavy from any special defect of
equity. Consequently their very sympathy, being so much built upon the
assumption that an only child had offended to the extent implied in his
sentence, oftentimes clothed itself in expressions which she felt to be not
consolations but insults, and, in fact, so many justifications of those whom
it relieved her overcharged heart to regard as the very worst