rong but guileless-hearted woman, her maternal solicitude would
have been the first denouncer, even the abrupt betrayer of a plotted
crime in which one companion of her son could have been implicated,
had cognizance of such reached her. Her days would have been
agonized, and her nights sleepless, till she might have exposed and
counteracted that spirit of defiant hate which watched its moment of
vantage to wreak an immortal wrong--till she might have sought the
intercession and absolution of the Church, her refuge, in behalf of
those she loved. The brains which were bold and crafty and couchant
enough to dare the world's opprobrium in the conception of a scheme
which held as naught the lives of men in highest places, would never
have imparted it to the intelligence, nor sought the aid nor
sympathy, of any living woman who had not, like Lady Macbeth,
"unsexed herself"--not though she were wise and discreet as Maria
Theresa or the Castilian Isabella. This woman knew it not. This
woman, who, on the morning preceding that blackest day in our
country's annals, knelt in the performance of her most sincere and
sacred duty at the confessional, and received the mystic rite of the
Eucharist, knew it not. Not only would she have rejected it with
horror, but such a proposition, presented by the guest who had sat
at her hearth as the friend and convive of the son upon whose arm
and integrity her widowed womanhood relied for solace and
protection, would have roused her maternal wits to some sure cunning
which would have contravened the crime and sheltered her son from
the evil influences and miserable results of such companionship.

The mothers of Charles IX. and of Nero could harbor underneath their
terrible smiles schemes for the violent and unshriven deaths, or the
moral vitiation and decadence which would painfully and gradually
remove lives sprung from their own, were they obstacles to their
demoniac ambition. But they wrought their awful romances of crime in
lands where the sun of supreme civilization, through a gorgeous
evening of Sybaritic luxury, was sinking, with red tints of
revolution, into the night of anarchy and national caducity. In our
own young nation, strong in its morality, energy, freedom, and
simplicity, assassination can never be indigenous. Even among the
desperadoes and imported lazzaroni of our largest cities, it is
comparatively an infrequent cause of fear.

The daughters of women to whom, in thei