ht more monstrous
still!

A mother and son associate in crime, and such a crime as this, which
half of the civilized world never saw matched in all its dreadful
bearings! Our judgments can have hardly recovered their unprejudiced
poise since the shock of the late horror, if we can contemplate with
credulity such a picture, conjured by the unjust spirits of
indiscriminate accusation and revenge. A crime which, in its public
magnitude, added to its private misery, would have driven even the
Atis-haunted heart of a Medici, a Borgia, or a Madame Bocarme to
wild confession before its accomplishment, and daunted even that
soul, of all the recorded world the most eager for novelty in
license, and most unshrinking in sin--the indurated soul of
Christina of Sweden; such a crime the profoundest plotters within
padded walls would scarcely dare whisper; the words forming the
expression of which, spoken aloud in the upper air, would convert
all listening boughs to aspens, and all glad sounds of nature to
shuddering wails. And this made known, even surmised, to a woman a
_materfamilias_ the good genius, the _placens_ _uxor_ of a home where
children had gathered all the influences of purity and the
reminiscences of innocence, where religion watched, and the Church
was minister and teacher!

Who--were circumstantial evidence strong and conclusive, such as
only time and the slow-weaving fates could elucidate and deny--who
will believe, when the mists of uncertainty which cloud the present
shall have dissolved, that a woman born and bred in respectability
and competence--a Christian mother, and a citizen who never
offended the laws of civil propriety; whose unfailing attention to
the most sacred duties of life has won for her the name of "a proper
Christian matron"; whose heart was ever warmed by charity; whose
door unbarred to the poor; and whose Penates had never cause to veil
their faces--who will believe that she could so suddenly and so
fully have learned the intricate arts of sin? A daughter of the
South, her life associations confirming her natal predilections, her
individual preferences inclined, without logic or question, to the
Southern people, but with no consciousness nor intent of disloyalty
to her government, and causing no exclusion from her friendship and
active favors of the people of the loyal North, nor repugnance in
the distribution among our Union soldiery of all needed comforts,
and on all occasions.

A st