office which corresponded with the government; for, as I have said, the
affair took place in a large provincial city, at a great distance from
the capital. All who knew this woman, or who were witnesses to the
alteration which one fortnight had wrought in her person as well as her
demeanor, fancied it impossible that she could continue to live; or
that, if she did, it must be through the giving way of her reason. They
proved, however, to be mistaken; or, at least, if (as some thought) her
reason did suffer in some degree, this result showed itself in the
inequality of her temper, in moody fits of abstraction, and the morbid
energy of her manner at times under the absence of all adequate
external excitement, rather than in any positive and apparent
hallucinations of thought. The charm which had mainly carried off the
instant danger to her faculties, was doubtless the intense sympathy
which she met with. And in these offices of consolation my wife stood
foremost. For, and that was fortunate, she had found herself able,
without violence to her own sincerest opinions in the case, to offer
precisely that form of sympathy which was most soothing to the angry
irritation of the poor mother; not only had she shown a _direct_
interest in the boy, and not a mere interest of _reflection_ from
that which she took in the mother, and had expressed it by visits to
his dungeon, and by every sort of attention to his comforts which his
case called for, or the prison regulations allowed; not only had she
wept with the distracted woman as if for a brother of her own; but,
which went farther than all the rest in softening the mother's heart,
she had loudly and indignantly proclaimed her belief in the boy's
innocence, and in the same tone her sense of the crying injustice
committed as to the selection of the victims, and the proportion of the
punishment awarded. Others, in the language of a great poet,

'Had pitied _her,_ and not her grief;'