If strangers could feel
in that way, if the mere hardened executioner could be melted at the
final scene,--it may be judged to what a fierce and terrific height
would ascend the affliction of a doating mother, constitutionally too
fervid in her affections. I have heard an official person declare, that
the spectacle of her desolation and frantic anguish was the most
frightful thing he had ever witnessed, and so harrowing to the
feelings, that all who could by their rank venture upon such an
irregularity, absented themselves during the critical period from the
office which corresponded with the government; for, as I have said, the
affair took place in a large provincial city, at a great distance from
the capital. All who knew this woman, or who were witnesses to the
alteration which one fortnight had wrought in her person as well as her
demeanor, fancied it impossible that she could continue to live; or
that, if she did, it must be through the giving way of her reason. They
proved, however, to be mistaken; or, at least, if (as some thought) her
reason did suffer in some degree, this result showed itself in the
inequality of her temper, in moody fits of abstraction, and the morbid
energy of her manner at times under the absence of all adequate
external excitement, rather than in any positive and apparent
hallucinations of thought.
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