"My wedding gown!" exclaimed she; "no, no—this—this is my sister's shroud! The hour for confession has arrived. It is God that impels me to speak. To win you I have lost my soul! Yes—yes—I am a murderess! She smiled upon me in the joyous affection of her young heart—but I gave her the fatal drug! Adelaide twined her white arms about my neck, but I administered the poison! Take me to your arms: I have lost my soul for you, and mine must you be!"
"She spread her long, white arms, and stood like a maniac before him," said the sexton, rising, in the excitement of the moment, and assuming the attitude he described; "and then," continued he, in a hollow voice, "at that moment came the thunder and the flash, and the guilty woman fell dead upon the floor!" The countenance of the narrator expressed all the horror that he felt.
"And the bridegroom," asked I; "the husband of the destroyer and the victims—what became of him?"
"He stands before you!" was the thrilling answer.
CALIFORNIA SPECULATION.
Mose Jenkins did not take the California fever when it first broke out; for he was, as he acknowledged himself, "slow-motioned," and his skull was of such formidable thickness, that it required a good many months for an idea to penetrate into his brain. In the interim, he delved and digged away on a corner of his father's farm, having leased the land of the old gentleman, and purchased his time of the same respectable individual for the purpose of working it. But to work a farm where the rocks are so near together, that the sheep's noses have to be sharpened before they can graze between them, is not a very profitable business; and Mose, by dint of hard thinking, arrived at the conclusion that there might possibly be some other occupation less laborious and quite as lucrative.
"Confound these granite rocks!" he exclaimed, one day, as he was ploughing, after he had broken his trace chains for a second time; "they hev another kind er rocks in Calliforny. Jehosaphat! If I was only thar. There a fellur hez to dig; but he gets pretty good wages—five thousand dollars a month is middlin', not to say fair."
In short, Mose Jenkins made up his mind to go to San Francisco, having got the wherewithal to carry him in a packet to the land of promise. Fearful of opposition, he communicated his project neither to the author of his days, the venerable Zephaniah Jenkins, nor to the beloved of his heart, Miss Prudence Salter, a cherry-cheeked damsel in a state of orphanage; but wrote down to a friend in Boston to secure a passage. He reserved his communications to the very last moment, when he was all ready for starting. His father gave him his blessing; Prudence was more difficult to manage.