d to whom that circumstance was unknown.

On examining the diagnostics that presented themselves, he pronounced
her complaint to be brain fever of the most formidable class, to wit,
that which arises from extraordinary pressure upon the mind, and unusual
excitement of the feelings. It was a relief to her family, however, to
know that beyond the temporary mental aberrations, inseparable from the
nature of her complaint, there was no evidence whatsoever of insanity.
They felt grateful to God for this, and were consequently enabled to
watch her sick-bed with more composure, and to look forward to her
ultimate recovery with a hope less morbid and gloomy. In this state
we are now compelled to leave them and her, and to beg the reader will
accompany us to another house of sorrow, where the mourning was still
more deep, and the spirits that were wounded driven into all the wild
and dreary darkness of affliction.

Our readers cannot forget the helpless state of intoxication, in which
Fardorougha left his unhappy son on the evening of the calamitous day
that saw him doomed to an ignominious death. His neighbors, as we then
said, having procured a car, assisted him home, and would, for his
wife's and son's sake, have afforded him all the sympathy in their
power; he was, however, so completely overcome with the spirits he had
drank, and an unconscious latent feeling of the dreadful sentence that
had been pronounced upon his son, that he required little else at their
hands than to keep him steady on the car. During the greater part of the
journey home, his language was only a continuation of the incoherencies
which Connor had, with such a humiliating sense of shame and sorrow,
witnessed in his prison cell. A little before they arrived within sight
of his house, his companions perceived that he had fallen asleep; but
to a stranger, ignorant of the occurrences of the day, the car presented
the appearance of a party returning from a wedding or from some other
occasion equally festive and social. Most of them were the worse for
liquor, and one of them in particular had reached a condition which
may be too often witnessed in this country. I mean that in which the
language becomes thick; the eye knowing but vacant; the face impudent
but relaxed; the limbs tottering, and the voice inveterately disposed
to melody. The general conversation, therefore, of those who accompanied
the old man was, as is usual with persons so circumstanced, high