ed an offense against the
Law. In any case, I may hope to have made atonement by obedience to the
Gospel."

Six weeks passed, and I heard from my reverend friend once more.

His second letter presented a marked contrast to the first. It was
written in sorrow and anxiety, to inform me of an alarming change
for the worse in his wife's health. I showed the letter to my medical
colleague. After reading it he predicted the event that might be
expected, in two words:--Sudden death.

On the next occasion when I heard from the Minister, the Doctor's grim
reply proved to be a prophecy fulfilled.

When we address expressions of condolence to bereaved friends, the
principles of popular hypocrisy sanction indiscriminate lying as a
duty which we owe to the dead--no matter what their lives may have
been--because they are dead. Within my own little sphere, I have always
been silent, when I could not offer to afflicted persons expressions of
sympathy which I honestly felt. To have condoled with the Minister on
the loss that he had sustained by the death of a woman, self-betrayed to
me as shamelessly deceitful, and pitilessly determined to reach her own
cruel ends, would have been to degrade myself by telling a deliberate
lie. I expressed in my answer all that an honest man naturally feels,
when he is writing to a friend in distress; carefully abstaining from
any allusion to the memory of his wife, or to the place which her
death had left vacant in his household. My letter, I am sorry to say,
disappointed and offended him. He wrote to me no more, until years had
passed, and time had exerted its influence in producing a more indulgent
frame of mind. These letters of a later date have been preserved, and
will probably be used, at the right time, for purposes of explanation
with which I may be connected in the future.

.......

The correspondent whom I had now lost was succeeded by a gentleman
entirely unknown to me.

Those reasons which induced me to conceal the names of persons, while I
was relating events in the prison, do not apply to correspondence with a
stranger writing from another place. I may, therefore, mention that Mr.
Dunboyne, of Fairmount, on the west coast of Ireland, was the writer of
the letter now addressed to me. He proved, to my surprise, to be one of
the relations whom the Prisoner under sentence of death had not cared to
see, when I offered her the opportunity of saying farewell. Mr. Dunboyne
was a brother-i