y confession of guilt never imputed to her, to
save him by taking his place upon the scaffold. Surely, such heroic
self-sacrifice suffices to

"sublime
Her dark despair and plead for its one crime."

It was probably on a discovery of this feeling in the girl that the
intermeddling sister-in-law founded her charge against the master.

But there is a point beyond which human endurance cannot go,--at
which milder natures turn to voluntary death as a refuge from further
suffering, and fiercer ones begin to contemplate crime with savage
complacency. Towards this point the ruthless and persevering cruelty of
these two women was now rapidly driving their wretched victim, and soon,
very soon, they were to learn that they had been hunting, not a lamb,
but a tigress, whose single spring, when brought to bay, would be as
quick, as sure, and as deadly as was ever made from an Indian jungle.
For now, near the end of the third year of Captain Wilde's married life,
its wretched scenes of discord and tyranny were about to be closed in a
catastrophe that was to overwhelm a great community with consternation
and horror, and blot an entire family out of existence almost in a
single night,--a catastrophe in which Providence, true to that ideal of
perfect justice called poetical, working out the punishment of two
of the actors by means of their own inhumanity, at the same time
mysteriously involved two others,--one clothed in all the innocence
of infancy, and the other guilty only through weakness and as the
instrument of another. Seldom has destruction been more sudden or more
complete, and never, perhaps, was so annihilating a blow dealt by so
weak a hand.

Those who remember the early times of Kentucky know that the place of
the agricultural and mechanics' fairs of the present day was supplied
by "big meetings," which, under the various names of associations,
camp-meetings, and basket-meetings, continued in full popularity to a
quite recent period, and were at last partially suppressed on account
of the immorality which they occasioned and encouraged. It was to these
holy fairs--as now to secular ones--that the wealth and fashion of
early Kentucky crowded for the purpose of displaying themselves most
conspicuously before the eyes of assembled counties. Mrs. Wilde, like
most women of her temper, was passionately fond of such public triumphs,
and had determined, at a camp-meeting soon to be held in