got a good start he would follow up her trail in the West as
remorselessly as I myself would have done.

Mrs. Winslow seemed to be absolutely without associates, either from a
confirmed habit of suspicion of everybody which she seemed to possess,
or from a resolve to maintain as good a character as possible until the
Winslow-Lyon case should be heard in court, so that her evidence, and
particularly her reputation, might not be impeached or broken down; and
it required the constant attention of both Bristol and Fox to discover
in her anything of even a suspicious character, as the nature of her
mediumistic business--allowing as it did scores of visitors daily access
to her rooms, only one being admitted to the trance-room of her
apartments at a time--gave her a vast advantage over them.

It was evident that she had in a measure persuaded herself that she had
a genuine cause of action against Lyon; or, that if she had not, she had
fully determined to make a big fight under any circumstances, as both
the prestige secured by the presumption of some shadow of a claim which
the mere pressing of it in court would give, and the assistance to her
which even a tithe of the damages she claimed would be, would not only
give her a degree of importance and respectability which would greatly
assist her in future operations, but would also yield her the means for
future comfort, without this terrible continued struggle for gold and
the happiness it is supposed to command.

How vain such a hope! and how strange that, with the bitter reminder of
countless never-realized ambitions before them, the adventurer and the
criminal will go on and on, still clinging to the shadow of a hope that
by _some_ exceptional freak of fortune in their favor they may gain the
peace and quietness they so agonizedly long for, but which is just as
irrevocably decreed to be forever beyond their reach as were the
luscious fruits to escape the touch and taste of the condemned and
tortured Phrygian king.

And right here, were I a preacher--being only a _doer_, however--I would
show the criminal neglect of parents, teachers and preachers in forever
warring for reformation, and never battling against the numberless packs
of little foxes of pride and covetousness of society, which drive weak
natures into a constant struggle to excel in power and display, eating
away at the vines until the life, like the fields, is left barren and
desolate, or is only a vast waste