gleaming on the sepulchral decorations of the banquet. The veiled,
skeleton sat in state, lifting the cypress-wreath above its head, as
the guerdon of some guest illustrious in the qualifications which
there claimed precedence. As the stewards deemed the world
inexhaustible in misery, and were desirous of recognizing it in all
its forms, they had not seen fit to reassemble the company of the
former year. New faces now threw their gloom across the table.

There was a man of nice conscience, who bore a blood-stain in his
heart--the death of a fellow-creature--which, for his more
exquisite torture, had chanced with such a peculiarity of
circumstances, that he could not absolutely determine whether his
will had entered into the deed or not. Therefore, his whole life
was spent in the agony of an inward trial for murder, with a
continual sifting of the details of his terrible calamity, until his
mind had no longer any thought, nor his soul any emotion,
disconnected with it, There was a mother, too,--a mother once, but a
desolation now,--who, many years before, had gone out on a pleasure-
party, and, returning, found her infant smothered in its little bed.
And ever since she has been tortured with the fantasy that her
buried baby lay smothering in its coffin. Then there was an aged
lady, who had lived from time immemorial with a constant tremor
quivering through her-frame. It was terrible to discern her dark
shadow tremulous upon the wall; her lips, likewise, were tremulous;
and the expression of her eye seemed to indicate that her soul was
trembling too. Owing to the bewilderment and confusion which made
almost a chaos of her intellect, it was impossible to discover what
dire misfortune had thus shaken her nature to its depths; so that
the stewards had admitted her to the table, not from any
acquaintance with her history, but on the safe testimony of her