I next read letters from the mother, dated both before and after the daughter’s marriage. They were written with great elegance and simplicity, and all started from the same point, and all came back to it again—a mother’s care and unceasing anxiety for her daughter’s physical health, for her mental improvement, for her moral purity. The court was touched; a manly sorrow sat, veiled, upon the hard features of the jury; the miser shook, like an aspen-leaf, through every limb. I paused—and then took up another, the last, written but a few days prior to the mother’s death, the last words of that mother to her child, in life. Its manner, the solemn cadence of the periods, the matter, fell slowly and heavily upon the ear, like the thick breathings of one with whom the world has little more to do. The shadow rested upon the hand as it wrote. It was crowded with the griefs of many years. It spoke darkly of wrongs received; of a stern resolve; of labors endured, and endured joyously for the offspring of a love struck-down, and changed to very hate, even in the first hour of its young life; of one whose name her daughter’s lips had never syllabled; of one living, prosperous in the world, the daughter’s father and her husband. Wait, yet a little while, and she should know the blood which had begotten her, and claim her own—a rich inheritance equal with the noblest in the land. Alas! that waiting was to be too long! Death had sealed the mother’s lips, and there sat the daughter, hunted, hunted like a hare by the hounds of the law. My client covered her face with the folds of her robe. “How does the mother sign herself?” asked the judge. “Ann Chapman, may it please your honor.” “Ann Chapman!” exclaimed John Cornelius springing to his feet. “Ann Chapman! Give me the letter.” I put it into his hands. His eyes glanced at the date, and then rested, fixed, upon the signature. The pallor of the dead crept slowly over him; his arms gave up their strength and fell to his side, the paper dropped upon the floor. “Here, take it, take it,” he said, in a hollow whisper, looking straight out upon vacuity; “it is nothing, nothing, nothing.” Then turning to his counsel, he bid them enter a discontinue, and walked hurriedly out of court. “This is a strange ending!” said the judge. “My client is mad!” said the opposite senior counsel. “Our client is mad!” echoed his junior, bundling up his papers with a piece of red tape. “Mad or sane, gentlemen, it is a fit conclusion to what should never have been begun,” said I, taking the young widow under my arm and leading her away, much wondering at the abrupt termination of the suit. “Do you think Mr. Cornelius has really gone mad?” she asked, looking up into my face with a tear upon her eyelids. It was one of sorrow, not joy; God bless her, she had forgotten her good fortune in sympathy for her oppressor.