“No matther what she is,” said a young fellow beside them; “the devil a purtier crature ever was made; be my soul, I only wish I had a thousand pounds, I wouldn't be long without a wife at any rate.”
The crowd having wrecked Skinadre's dwelling, and carried off and destroyed almost his whole stock of provisions, now proceeded in a different direction, with the intention of paying a similar visit to some similar character. Sarah and Darby—for he durst not venture, for the present, towards his own house—now took their way to the cabin of old Condy Dalton, where they arrived just in time to find the house surrounded by the officers of justice, and some military.
“Ah,” thought Sarah, on seeing them; “it is done, then, an' you lost but little time about it. May God forgive you, father.”
They had scarcely entered, when one of the officers pulling out a paper, looked at it and asked, “Isn't your name Condy or Cornelius Dalton?”—
“That is my name,” said the old man.
“I arrest you, then,” he continued, “for the murder of one Bartholomew Sullivan.”
“It is the will of God,” replied the old man, while the tears flowed down his cheeks—“it's God's will, an' I won't consale it any longer; take me away—I'm guilty—I'm guilty.”
CHAPTEE XXI. — Condy Datton goes to Prison.
The scene that presented itself in Condy Dalton's miserable cabin was one, indeed, which might well harrow any heart not utterly callous to human sympathy. The unhappy old man had been sitting in the armchair we have alluded to, his chin resting on his breast, and his mind apparently absorbed in deep and painful reflection, when the officers of justice entered. Many of our Landlord readers, and all, probably, of our Absentee ones, will, in the simplicity of their ignorance regarding the actual state of the lower classes, most likely take it for granted that the picture we are about to draw exists nowhere but in our own imagination. Would to God that it were so! Gladly and willingly would we take to ourselves all the shame; acknowledge all the falsehood; pay the highest penalty for all the moral guilt of our misrepresentations, provided only any one acquainted with the country could prove to us that we are wrong, change our nature, or, in other words, falsify the evidence of our senses and obliterate our experience of the truths we are describing.