bosom of its benefaction, warmed and excited itself into a more vigorous venom? Was there no sympathy in the scene? Was there no remorse at the crime? Was there no horror at its consequences?

"Were honour, virtue, conscience, all exil'd!

Was there no pity, no relenting ruth,

To show the parents fondling o'er their child,

Then paint the ruin'd pair and their distraction wild!?

BURNS.

No! no! He was at that instant planning their destruction; and, even within four short days, he deliberately reduced those parents to childishness, that husband to widowhood, those smiling infants to anticipated orphanage, and that peaceful, hospitable, confiding family, to helpless, hopeless, irremediable ruin!

Upon the first day of the ensuing July, Mr. Guthrie was to dine with the Connaught bar, at the hotel of Portobello. It is a custom, I am told, with the gentlemen of that association to dine together previous to the circuit; of course my client could not have decorously absented himself. Mrs. Guthrie appeared a little feverish, and he requested that, on his retiring, she would compose herself to rest; she promised him she would; and when he departed, somewhat abruptly, to put some letters in the post-office, she exclaimed, "What! John, are you going to leave me thus?" He returned, and she kissed him. They seldom parted, even for any time, without that token of affection. I am thus minute, Gentlemen, that you may see, up to the last moment, what little cause the hus

band had for suspicion, and how impossible it was for him to foresee a perfidy which nothing short of infatuation could have produced. He proceeded to his companions with no other regret than that necessity, for a moment, forced him from a home, which the smile of affection had never ceased to endear to him. After a day, however, passed, as such a day might have been supposed to pass, in the flow of soul, and the philosophy of pleasure, he returned home to share his happiness with her, without whom no happiness ever had been perfect. Alas! he was never to behold her more! Imagine, if you can, the phrenzy of his astonishment, in being informed by Mrs. Porter, the daughter of the former landlady, that about two hours before, she had attended Mrs. Guthrie to a confectioner's shop; that a carriage had drawn up at the corner of the street, into which a gentleman, whom she recognised to be a Mr. Sterne, had handed her, and they instantly departed. I must tell you, there is every reason to believe, that this woman was the confidant of the conspiracy. What a pity that the object of that guilty confidence had not something of humanity; that, as a female, she did not feel for the character of her sex; that, as a mother, she did not mourn over the sorrows of a helpless family! What pangs might she not have spared? My client could hear no more: even at the dead of night he rushed into the street, as if in its own dark hour he could discover guilt's reIn vain did he awake the peaceful family of the horror-struck Mrs. Fallon; in vain with the

cesses.

parents of the miserable fugitive, did he mingle the tears of an impotent distraction; in vain, a miserable maniac, did he traverse the silent streets of the metropolis, affrighting virtue from its slumber, with the spectre of its own ruin. I will not harrow you with its heart-rending recital. But imagine you see him, when the day had dawned, returning wretched to his deserted dwelling; seeing in every chamber a memorial of his loss, and hearing every tongueless object eloquent of his wo. Imagine you see him, in the reverie of his grief, trying to persuade himself it was all a vision, and awakened only to the horrid truth by his helpless children asking him for their mother!Gentlemen, this is not a picture of the fancy; it literally occurred: there is something less of romance in the reflection, which his children awakened in the mind of their afflicted father; he ordered that they should be immediately habited in mourning. How rational sometimes are the ravings of insanity! For all the purposes of maternal life, poor innocents! they have no mother! her tongue no more can teach, her hand no more can tend them; for them there is not "speculation in her eyes;" to them her life is something worse than death; as if the awful grave had yawned her forth, she moves before them, shrouded all in sin, the guilty burden of its peaceless sepulchre. Better, far better, their little feet had followed in her funeral, than the hour which taught her value, should reveal her vice,―mourning her loss, they might have blessed

her memory; and shame need not have rolled its fires into the fountain of their sorrow.

As soon as his reason became sufficiently collected, Mr. Guthrie pursued the fugitives: he traced them successively to Kildare, to Carlow, Waterford, Milfordhaven, on through Wales, and finally to Ilfracombe, in Devonshire, where the clue was lost. I am glad that, in this route and restlessness of their guilt, as the crime they perpetrated was foreign to our soil, they did not make that soil the scene of its habitation. I will not follow them through this joyless journey, nor brand by my record the unconscious scene of its pollution. But philosophy never taught, the pulpit never enforced, a more imperative morality than the itinerary of that accursed tour promulgates. -Oh! if there be a maid or matron in this island, balancing between the alternative of virtue and of crime, trembling between the hell of the seducer and the adulterer, and the heaven of the parental and the nuptial home, let her pause upon this one out of the many horrors I could depict,—and be converted. I will give you the relation in the very words of my brief; I cannot improve upon the simplicity of the recital :

"On the 7th of July they arrived at Milford; the captain of the packet dined with them, and was astonished at the magnificence of her dress." (Poor wretch! she was decked and adorned for the sacrifice!) "The next day they dined alone. Towards evening, the housemaid, passing near their chamber, heard Mr. Sterne scolding, and

apparently beating her! In a short time after, Mrs. Guthrie rushed out of her chamber into the drawing-room, and throwing herself in agony upon the sofa, she exclaimed, "Oh! what an unhappy wretch I am!-I left my home, where I was happy, too happy, seduced by a man who has deceived me. My poor HUSBAND! my dear CHILDREN! Oh! if they would even let my little WILLIAM live with me!—it would be some consolation to my BROKEN HEART!

"Alas! nor children more can she behold,

Nor friends, nor sacred home."

יין.

Well might she lament over her fallen fortunes! well might she mourn over the memory of days when the sun of heaven seemed to rise but for her happiness! well might she recall the home she had endeared, the children she had nursed, the hapless husband, of whose life she was the pulse! But one short week before, this earth could not reveal a lovelier vision:-Virtue blessed, affection followed, beauty beamed on her; the light of every eye, the charm of every heart, she moved along in cloudless chastity, cheered by the song of love, and circled by the splendours she created! Behold her now, the loathsome refuse of an adulterous bed; festering in the very infection of her crime; the scoff and scorn of their unmanly, merciless, inhuman author? But thus it ever is with the votaries of guilt; the birth of their crime is the death of their enjoyment; and the wretch who flings his offering on its altar, falls an immediate victim to the flame of his devotion. I am glad it