Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/26

Rh, and laughless. No human being laughs then; for the weight of worlds rests upon human shoulders.

It is a bad sign any man hangs out when he makes "fun" of what ought to challenge his holiest emotions and most profound respect. There was a young man of the fun-making genus,—a fellow whose nature was inflamed nearly a year before his birth, and who kept it up to boiling-point by food and drink, and the secret books he first read, and then so artfully concealed, that the servant-girls were sure to find them,—read, get detected,—of course, by the owner.—result, destruction to poor she,—brag by he, who of course was petted and made much of, while his victim's head, in time hung low, for a bleeding heart was breaking. Well, this Lothario's eyes used to fairly glisten when they rested upon any young female form, and the burden of his talk was the victories he had won over too confiding women. Brag.

It so happened that he was one of a jury of inquest over the dead body of poor Maria Lee, a child of sixteen summers, whom a rich merchant of Loudon had betrayed, and then procured a double murder at the hands of an abortionist. Poor child! she bled to death from a skewer of steel run clean through both the uterus and its contents. The rich merchant paid some money;—some more in charity:—by-and-by joined the church, and his sin was forgotten. The medical practitioner went to jail for six months; was pardoned out in five weeks; and the babe went back to heaven in the arms of its slaughtered mother.

But there she lay, poor child, upon the long work-table of good Simon Scott, the carpenter, all pale and delicate as finest Parian marble or wax-work, and beautiful! O God, how immortally beautiful!—just as Deity had fashioned her before the rich merchant of Loudon and his friends, the doctor and death, had finished the work so fairly begun—finished her for the grave and heaven; for if ever its golden portals swing wide to admit a shining soul, surely its hinges will revolve like lightning to let in a ruined woman. Well, the autopsy went on; the facts were disclosed: and while the surgeon plied his work, and a strong magnifying glass was handed round among the jurymen, none were so eager and earnest