perhaps I might say of heroic mind, supported by a courage that was
absolutely indomitable, and by a strength of bodily frame very unusual
in a woman, and beyond the promise even of her person. She had suffered
as deep a wrench in her own affections as a human being can suffer; she
had lost her one sole child, a fair-haired boy of most striking beauty
and interesting disposition, at the age of seventeen, and by the worst
of all possible fates; he lived (as we did at that time) in a large
commercial city overflowing with profligacy, and with temptations of
every order; he had been led astray; culpable he had been, but by very
much the least culpable of the set into which accident had thrown him,
as regarded acts and probable intentions; and as regarded palliations
from childish years, from total inexperience, or any other alleviating
circumstances that could be urged, having everything to plead--and of
all his accomplices the only one who had anything to plead. Interest,
however, he had little or none; and whilst some hoary villains of the
party, who happened to be more powerfully befriended, were finally
allowed to escape with a punishment little more than nominal, he and
two others were selected as sacrifices to the offended laws. They
suffered capitally. All three behaved well; but the poor boy in
particular, with a courage, a resignation, and a meekness, so
distinguished and beyond his years as to attract the admiration and the
liveliest sympathy of the public universally. If strangers could feel
in that way, if the mere hardened executioner could be melted at the
final scene,--it may be judged to what a fierce and terrific height
would ascend the affliction of a doating mother, constitutionally too
fervid in her affections. I have heard an official person declare, that
the spectacle of her desolation and frantic anguish was the most
frightful thing he had ever witnessed, and so harrowing to the
feelings, that all who could by their rank venture upon such an
irregularity, absented themselves during the critical period from the