wore not the aspect of truth--and that, had
he held a stricter and a stronger hand on the errors of his misguided
son, this foul deed had not been perpetrated, nor that wretched sinner's
soul given to perdition. Yet others had gentler and humaner thoughts.
They remembered him walking along God-supported beneath the bier--and at
the mouth of the grave--and feared to look on that head--formerly
grizzled, but now quite grey--when on the very first Sabbath after the
murder he took his place in the elders' seat, and was able to stand up,
along with the rest of the congregation, when the minister prayed for
peace to his soul, and hoped for the deliverance out of jeopardy of him
now lying in bonds. A low Amen went all round the kirk at these words;
for the most hopeless called to mind that maxim of law, equity, and
justice--that every man under accusation of crime should be held
innocent till he is proved to be guilty. Nay, a human tribunal might
condemn him, and yet might he stand acquitted before the tribunal of
God.

There were various accounts of the behaviour of the prisoner. Some said
that he was desperately hardened--others, sunk in sullen apathy and
indifference--and one or two persons belonging to the parish who had
seen him declared that he seemed to care not for himself, but to be
plunged in profound melancholy for the fate of Margaret Burnside, whose
name he involuntarily mentioned, and then bowed his head on his knees
and wept. His guilt he neither admitted at that interview, nor denied;
but he confessed that some circumstances bore hard against him, and that
he was prepared for the event of his trial--condemnation and death. "But
if you are not guilty, Ludovic, _who can be the murderer_? Not the
slightest shade of suspicion has fallen on any other person--and did
not, alas! the body bleed when"--The unhappy wretch sprang up from the
bed, it was said, at these words, and hurried like a madman back and
forward along the stone floor of his cell. "Yea--yea!" at last he cried,
"the mouth and nostrils of my Margaret did indeed bleed when they
pressed down my hand on her cold bosom. It is God's truth!" "God's
truth?"--"Yes--God's truth, I saw first one drop, and then another,
trickle towards me--and I prayed to our Saviour to wipe them off before
other eyes might behold the dreadful witnesses against me; but at that
hour Heaven was most unmerciful--for those two small drops--as all of
you saw--soon became a very stream-