I am the only child of Joel and Julia Hetman. The one was a well-to-
do country gentleman, the other a beautiful and accomplished woman to
whom he was passionately attached with what I now know to have been a
jealous and exacting devotion. The family home was a few miles from
Nashville, Tennessee, a large, irregularly built dwelling of no
particular order of architecture, a little way off the road, in a
park of trees and shrubbery.

At the time of which I write I was nineteen years old, a student at
Yale. One day I received a telegram from my father of such urgency
that in compliance with its unexplained demand I left at once for
home. At the railway station in Nashville a distant relative awaited
me to apprise me of the reason for my recall: my mother had been
barbarously murdered--why and by whom none could conjecture, but the
circumstances were these: My father had gone to Nashville, intending
to return the next afternoon. Something prevented his accomplishing
the business in hand, so he returned on the same night, arriving just
before the dawn. In his testimony before the coroner he explained
that having no latchkey and not caring to disturb the sleeping
servants, he had, with no clearly defined intention, gone round to
the rear of the house. As he turned an angle of the building, he
heard a sound as of a door gently closed, and saw in the darkness,
indistinctly, the figure of a man, which instantly disappeared among
the trees of the lawn. A hasty pursuit and brief search of the
grounds in the belief that the trespasser was some one secretly
visiting a servant proving fruitless, he entered at the unlocked door
and mounted the stairs to my mother's chamber. Its door was open,
and stepping into black darkness he fell headlong over some heavy
object on the floor. I may spare myself the details; it was my poor