as
her pleader did, from the standpoint of Felix and Thomas Cadwalader.

Thomas Cadwalader--now called Adams--never knew his mother; she died in
his early infancy. Nor could he be said to have known his father, having
been brought up in France by an old Scotch lawyer, who, being related to
his mother, sometimes spoke of her, but never of his father, till Thomas
had reached his fifteenth year. Then he put certain books into his
hands, with this remarkable injunction:

"Here are romances, Thomas. Read them; but remember that none of them,
no matter how thrilling in matter or effect, will ever equal the story
of your father's bitterly wronged and suffering life."

"My father!" he cried; "tell me about him; I have never heard."

But his guardian, satisfied with an allusion which he knew must bear
fruit in the extremely susceptible nature of this isolated boy, said no
more that day, and Thomas turned to the books. But nothing after that
could ever take his mind away from his father. He had scarcely thought
of him for years, but now that that father had been placed before him in
the light of a wronged man, he found himself continually hunting back in
the deepest recesses of his memory for some long-forgotten recollection
of that father's features calculated to restore his image to his eyes.
Sometimes he succeeded in this, or thought he did; but this image, if
image it was, was so speedily lost in a sensation of something strange
and awe-compelling enveloping it, that he found himself more absorbed by
the intangible impressions associated with this memory than by the
memory itself. What were these impressions, and in what had they
originated? In vain he tried to determine. They were as vague as they
were persistent. A stretch of darkness--two bars of orange light, always
shining, always the same--black lines against these bars, like the tops
of distant gables--an inner thrill--a vague affright--a rush about him
as of a swooping wind--all this came with his father's image, only to
fade away with it, leaving him troubled, uneasy, and perplexed. Finding
these impressions persistent, and receiving no explanation of them in
his own mind, he finally asked his guardian what they meant. But that
guardian was as ignorant as himself on this topic; and satisfied with
having roused the boy's imagination, confined himself to hints, dropped
now and then with a judiciousness which proved the existence of a
deliberate purpose, of some dut