honest man, till I impaled him in a prison, where sobriety was scoffed at, and honesty despised. I was the perpetual inmate of gaols, and there I was perpetually tormented with the presence of my victims. To whatever cell I might retire, the cries of the orphan rang in my ears; the tears of the widow fell upon my heart. Conscience carried me over houses that I had desolated, and fancy led me to graves that I had filled. This-this the triumph of remorse was cruel; but when I turned from the dread convictions of my own thoughts, and went again among my fellow prisoners, it was agony, soul-wringing agony, to endure the presence of those whom I had wronged.

"At last, after a term of suffering in the other prisons, I got removed to the King's Bench, and there I hoped I had no victims-I was wrong; yet all the first day I saw no one whom I knew, and then

'The strong delusion gained me more and more;

but the events of night dispelled it.

"About eleven o'clock, the hour fixed by law for the retirement of the prisoners, an alarm of serious illness was raised, and an expression of general indignation pervaded the debtors as to the cause. A woman, they said, was dying of want in one of the rooms on the ground floor on the poor side of the prison, and a number of persons had gathered round the door of the apartment in which the sufferer lay. I followed mechanically with the rest, and saw what they saw. Little could they feel what I felt.

"The crowd, as soon as they had satisfied their curiosity, dispersed in groups to talk over the poor

woman's fate. But I-I could not leave an impulse which I could not resist, a chain which I could not sever, bound me to the cold stone on which I stood; I could not pass from the door of that room, although I yet only knew that a poor woman had laid down to die, and I had seen nothing but a curtainless bed and a barren chamber, as they had been dimly revealed by the light of a small lamp to all who had gathered without. But after all had gone my heart remained a beating listener to a voice that made itself heard in its most secret cells a whisper of destiny that mysteriously connected my fate with hers, here the miserable tenant of the desolate room; a spell of mingled terror and excitement was upon me and around me, and I felt that I must go within to see her die.

"In another moment the doctor of the prison entered, and I stole after him into the room. There was a deep shadow of the vaulted roof in one corner, and in its darkness I stood to listen and to gaze. The physician had intended to order the patient's removal to the prison infirmary, but he saw that it was too late. On her low bedstead she lay dreaming away her spirit, in her last earthly sleep; the next would be the sleep of death. A woman, who from pity had sat up with her, would have awakened her to the doctor's presence, but he would not have it. Let her be,' said he, it will be soon over.'

"By her lay her young children, one on either side, awake, watchful, silent, their eyes filled with tears, and fixed upon the poor parent who was soon to leave them alone in the world. As she turned her face to the wall we could not see her, but in her dreams she murmured of her want and woe. My heart beat so loudly as almost to make an echo; it startled all within. The doctor

turned towards me, and would have spoken, but again the dreamer murmured, and I heard my own name upon her lips. Gently she spoke it, and in sleep, but to me it was as God's announcement of eternity in rolling thunder. I felt it as the unravelment of fate; the right hand of retribution was stretched out to seize me-my hour of punishment was come. I tottered towards the bed to satisfy my sight (at that moment I would have given my life that my ears had played me false); the woman, as if destiny had determined she should confront me in death, turned towards me, her features flashed upon my eyes and blinded them, a mist was before me, I stood as a man in a dark fog-one gasp, one cold shiver, and the rest was chaos.

"I saw no more of the patient.

Soon after I had

been carried insensible from her chamber she died, died of grief and starvation- ANOTHER of MY VICTIMS.

"She had been left a widow with her two fatherless boys, and out of kindness for her husband's memory she had put her name to a bill after his death to accommodate one of his former friends. Upon that bill, two years before, I had arrested and thrown her into prison; there she lived friendless and pennyless. Often had she sent her eldest boy to appeal to me, with the touching eloquence of childhood, for his mother's liberty; but no, I had no deity but gold, and mercy had no resting-place in my heart. I let her starve.-I let her die! Oh, God! Hers was the final triumph.

"Never till I saw her face in her dying hour did I know that she was the same fair and kind creature whom as a boy I had wooed and loved before my mother's death; whom as a monster I had deserted after my

father had changed my worship and altered my faith, and despoiled my heart of purity of early passion, to place there Mammon's altar and Moloch's priest.

"I awoke with the brain fever, which overtook me a wild raving madman, but not so mad as to forget that I was a murderer too. The vision of that woman and her children was ever before my heart and eyes, and not less was I haunted by my other victims. Aloud I counted over the curses of those whom I had wronged and ruined. I shrieked forth imprecations upon my own head for hearts that I had blighted and homes that I had despoiled. The wife, the widow, and the orphan, the husband, the father, and the friend, were revenged upon me with the terrible vengeance of my own voice. They bound my limbs and chained my body, but they could not prevent me from cursing myself, from crying aloud in the hellpains of my spirit, from raving with the agony of my remorse. And now who dares say that I am not a murderer, when the fiends of darkness are pointing at me, and my victims are besetting me with their cries. Look, look, look!-yonder where the sun has cleared away the cloudy mist; there they come to torment me; see how the children weep; hark how the mothers wail in the storm. There is a hand pointing at me through the tempest, and look, my name is written in tears and blood upon the sky!"

I could not now stay the wild ravings of the maniac, for with the conclusion of his story, and the memories which it had called up, his lucid interval had ceased.

LADY EMILY ESTHER ANNE HESKETH is youngest daughter of the late Earl Beauchamp, and wife of LLOYD HESKETH BAMFORD HESKETH, Esq., of Gwrych Castle, High Sheriff of Denbighshire in 1828.

The Heskeths were established in England by one of the companions in arms of the Conqueror, and have flourished in the county of Lancaster for more than seven hundred years, being now in the actual enjoyment of the greater part of the landed property acquired at the commencement of that remote era. The family became eventually separated into two distinguished branches-the Heskeths of Rufford, now represented by Sir Thomas Dalrymple Hesketh, Bart.; and the Heskeths of Rossal, whose chief is the present Peter Hesketh Fleetwood, Esq., M.P. for Preston. ROBERT HESKETH, Esq., of Upton in Cheshire, a younger son