Presently there was a stir about the door, and four boys appeared, bearing out the lost treasure. The cemetery was near, and these boys were to bear the child to her resting-place there. Slowly and tenderly they carried their burden, and not far away those eyes, full of hopeless agony, strained to watch them.
The sill of the gate was a step higher than the garden walk, and as the foremost boys mounted this step, the casket tilted a little, and the eyes of the condemned man saw, through the glass lid, a white little face turned sidewise, with its cheek in the palm of a waxen hand, and sunny hair flowing around, the whole framed in flowers.
As the sweet, pathetic vision passed, the convict fell on his face, with loud and bitter weeping.
Three days after, Jeffries mounted the scaffold, humbled, penitent, and hopeful.
“I am glad it is God’s will that I should die now,” he said. “After what I have done, my life would be too terrible to me, and would not profit any one else. But I do not consider this hanging the punishment for my crime. No; my reward for having killed willingly one I hated, was that I afterward destroyed unwillingly a life dearer to me than my own. I forgive all who have injured me, and ask pardon of all whom I have injured. And I bless God for the little love on earth that made me believe in the Infinite Love in heaven.”
They were his last words.
Perhaps the warden’s dear little girl would never, in a long and beautiful life, have accomplished the good which was effected by her early and pitiful death.
[LETTERS OF HIS HOLINESS PIUS IX. APPROVING THE RULES OF THE “UNION OF CHRISTIAN WOMEN.”]
The following letters of the Sovereign Pontiff which we have taken from the Boston Pilot are published in the present number of The Catholic World, on account of their bearing upon the topics discussed in the articles on the “Duties of the Rich.” We recommend their perusal in a special manner to all Catholic ladies in the United States.