the
roses and evergreens. It was a little paradise in the hills, where Love,
the home-angel, brightened every room and blessed every heart. But
trouble came in the shape of business reverses; and the worried look and
wakeful nights of the husband told how heavy were the blows that had
fallen upon this hard and willing worker. The course of ruin in
California was fearfully rapid in those days. When a man's financial
supports began to give way, they went with a crash. The movement
downward was with a rush that gave no time for putting on the brakes.
You were at the bottom, a wreck, almost before you knew it. So it was in
this case. Every thing was swept away, a mountain of unpaid debts was
piled up, credit was gone, clamor of creditors deafened him, and the
gaunt wolf of actual want looked in through the door of the cottage upon
the dear wife and little ones. Another shadow, and a yet darker one,
settled upon them. The unhappy man had been tampering with the delusion
of spiritualism, and his wife had been drawn with him into a partial
belief in its vagaries. In their troubles they sought the aid of the
"familiar spirits" that peeped and muttered through speaking, writing,
and rapping mediums. This kept them in a state of morbid excitement that
increased from day to day until they were wrought up to a tension that
verged on insanity. The lying spirits; or the frenzy of his own heated
brain, turned his thought to death as the only escape from want.

"I see our way out of these troubles, wife," he said one night, as they
sat hand in hand in the bedchamber, where the children were lying
asleep. "We will all die together! This has been revealed to me as the
solution of all our difficulties. Yes, we will enter the beautiful
spirit-world together! This is freedom! It is only getting out of
prison. Bright spirits beckon and call us. I am ready."

There was a gleam of madness in his eyes, and, as he took a pistol from
a bureau-drawer, an answering gleam flashed forth from the eyes of the
wife, as she said:

"Yes, love, we will all go together. I too am ready."

The sleeping children were breathing sweetly, unmindful of the horror
that the devil was hatching.

"The children first, then you, and then me," he said, his eye kindling
with increasing excitement.

He penciled a short note addressed to one of his old friends, asking him
to attend to the burial of the bodies, then they kissed each of the
sleeping children, and then