THE HEAD OF HERCULES.
One of the most curious cases that ever came under my notice in a long course of criminal practice was not brought into any court, and, as I believe, has never been published until now. The details of the affair came under my personal cognizance in the following manner:
In 1858 I went down into the Shenandoah valley to spend my summer vacation among the innumerable Pages, Marshalls, and Cookes who all hailed me as cousin, by right of traditional intermarriages generations back. My first visit was to the house of McCormack Beardsley, a kinsman and school-fellow whom I had not seen since we parted at the university twenty years before.
We were both gray-haired old fellows now, but I had grown thin and sharp in the courts of Baltimore and Washington, while he had lived quietly on his plantation, more fat and jovial and genial with every year.
Beardsley possessed large means then, and maintained the unlimited hospitality usual among large Virginia planters before the war. The house was crowded during my stay with my old friends from the valley and southern countries. His daughter, too, was not only a beauty, but a favorite among the young people, and brought many attractive, well-bred girls about her, and young men who were not so attractive or well bred. Lack of occupation and a definite career had reduced the sons of too many Virginia families at that time to cards and horses as their sole pursuits; the war, while it left them penniless, was in one sense their salvation.
One evening, sitting on the verandah with Beardsley, smoking, and looking in the open windows of the parlor, I noticed a woman who sat a little apart, and who, as I fancied, was avoided by the younger girls. In a Virginia country party there are always two or three unmarried women, past their first youth, with merry blue eyes, brown hair, and delicate features—women "with a history," but who are none the less good dancers, riders, and able to put all their cleverness into the making of a pie or a match for their cousins. This woman was blue-eyed and brown-haired, but she had none of the neat, wide-awake self-possession of her class. She had a more childish expression, and spoke with a more timid uncertainty, than even Lotty Beardsley, who was still in the schoolroom. I called my host's attention to her and asked who she was.
"It is the daughter of my cousin, General George Waring. You remember him surely—of the Henrico branch of Warings?"
"Certainly. But he had only one child—Louisa; and I remember receiving an invitation to her wedding years ago."